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SOCIETY 


THE  REDEEMED  FORM  OF  MAN, 


THE  EARNEST  OF  GOD'S  OMNIPOTENCE 
IN  HUMAN  NATURE: 


AFFIRMED  IN 


LETTERS   TO  A   FRIEND 


By  henry  JAMES. 


"  Man  during  his  earthly  life  induces  a  form  in  the  purest  substances  of  his 
interiors,  so  that  he  may  be  said  to  form  his  o\vn  soul,  or  give  it  quality-;  and 
according  to  the  form  or  quality  of  soul  he  thus  gives  himself  will  be  his  subsequent 
receptivity  to  the  Lord's  inflowing  life  :  which  is  a  life  of  love  to  the  -whole  hiimati 
race." 


BOSTON: 
HOUGHTON,  OSGOOD   AND    COMPANY. 

die  EiljjrBiTie  JPrcBg,  Cambrttse. 
1879. 


Copyright,  1879. 
By   henry   JAME  S. 


ELECTROTYPED   AND   PRINTED   AT   THE   UNIVERSITY    PRESS, 
CAMBRIDGE. 


CONTENTS 


LETTER  I. 

PAGE 

Antagonism  between  the  ideas  of  human  freedom  and  human  destiny  3 

"  Destiny  "  fatal  to  nature  as  well    16 

LETTER  II. 

History  a  struggle  between  man's  race  force  and  his  personal  force  17 

The  struggle  is  inherent  in  man's  creatureship    20 

His  spiritual  creation  exacts  his  previous  natural  formation  22 

To  what  creative  excellency  is  this  exaction  owing  ?   24 

LETTER   III. 

The  meaning  of  Infinite  Love    26 

It  means,  freedom  from  self-love,  and  hence  stamps  self-love  unreal  28 

Inferiority  of  science  to  philosophy  as  an  intellectual  culture 30 

Man  unreal  in  se,  and  made  real  only  by  natural  redemption     32 

Primacy  of  the  heart  in  belief    34 

LETTER  IV. 

Divine  truth  has  first  to  create  the  intelligence  it  afterwards  en- 
lightens      35 

Its  force  purely  regenerative 38 

Persistent  Judaism  of  the  Church 39 

"  Professional "  religion  the  true  Antichrist 40 

Ritualism,  revivalism,  radicalism 42 


IV  CONTENTS. 


LETTEK  V. 

Sudden  demoralization  of  tlie  writer 43 

Almost  complete  moral  imbecility 46 

Charm  of  English  landscape  47 

Growing  delight  in  nature,  and  disgust  with  oneself 48 

A  friend's  account  of  Swedeuborg 50 

I  am  much  interested 51 

I  resolve  to  read  him 52 

LETTER  VI. 

A  few  explanatory  words  about  Swedenborg 53 

LETTER  VII. 

Further  observations  about  Swedenborg 64 

LETTER  VIII. 

My  moral  death  and  burial 70 

Profound  moral  illusion  under  which  I  had  been  living 72 

My  relief  from  it  equivalent  to  my  belief  in  the  incarnation   74! 

The  moral  law  essentially  typical  and  prophetic  76 

Its  votaries  make  it  utterly  flat,  vapid,  and  spiritless 78 

The  law  a  present  stench  in  the  earth  80 

LETTER  IX. 

Difference  between  the  real  Jew  and  the  Christian  imitation 81 

"We  live  not  under  a  literal  but  a  spiritual  Divine  administration  ...  84 

Growing  indifference  of  men  to  their  civic  repute 86 

Our  current  ecclesiastical  culture  frivolous  and  unmanly 88 

The  horse-car  our  true  Shechinah  at  this  day  90 

Christ's  precise  work  on  earth  92 

LETTER  X. 

Swedenborg's  interpretation  of  the  gospel    93 

The  origin  of  spiritual  evil 9G 


CONTENTS, 


Creation  inevitably  contracts  soil  on  its  subjective  side  98 

Creation  as  a  spiritual  work  of  God  is  plainly  miraculous,  and 

therefore  admits  no  witness  but  that  of  life  or  consciousness  100 

LETTER  XI. 

Objection  to  miracle 104 

Miracle  is  bad  science,  but  very  good  philosophy 106 

My  own  intellectual  attitude  towards  miracle 112 

Infirmity  of  the  critical  or  sceptical  understanding 118 

Swedenborg  an  out-and-out  realist 124 

LETTER  XII. 

Creation  a  spontaneous  work  125 

Nature  unreal  and  impersonal 127 

It  is  a  functioning  of  Divine  Love  towards  our  spiritual  manhood  130 

The  educative  use  of  our  natural  experience  132 

Genesis  of  this  absurd  cosmological  "  Nothing  "   134 

Creation  as  a  letter  an  immense  fallacy 136 

Creation  has  no  locus  in  quo  but  the  human  consciousness  138 

Its  sole  and  total  method  :  Redemption 140 

LETTER  XIII. 

God  the  sole  subject  in  creation,  man  the  sole  object 141 

Creation  only  a  philosophic  name  for  our  natural  redemption 144 

What  do  we  mean  by  the  term  Nature  ? 146 

Nature  a  strictly  subjective,  or  metaphysical  existence 148 

Concrete  uses  of  the  word 150 

Nature  realizable  to  thought,  but  not  to  sense  152 

Human  nature  is  the  sphere  of  man's  subjective  relations 154 

It  has  no  existence  but  as  the  attribute  of  a  subject 156 

Humanity  not  a  material  fact,  but  a  spiritual  truth 158 

Human  nature  the  living  link  between  God  and  man IGO 

Our  selfhood  inexplicable  without  the  creator's  natural  incar- 
nation      162 


Vi  CONTENTS. 


LETTEE  XIV. 

Personality  the  true  ground  of  unbelief 164 

Natural  iucarnation  the  only  method  of  spiritual  creation 166 

History  nothing  else  than  a  theatre  of  Divine  revelation 174 

Spiritual  value  of  miracle  as  a  scientific  irritant 178 

LETTEE  XV. 

Human  nature  vs.  the  human  person 180 

The  church,  the  main  citadel  of  existing  evil  and  falsity  182 

Claim  of  a  personal  interest  in  Christ  preposterous 184 

Swedenborg's  doctrine  of  the  constitution  of  the  church  186 

Statements  in  regard  to  the  prehistoric  church  188 

Innocence  of  a  natural  inclination  to  selfhood   190 

Unhandsome  pre-natal  developments  of  the  church  192 

Creation  essentially  miraculous   194 

LETTEE  XVI. 

Our  selfish  and  worldly  loves   made  evil  by  the  influence  of 

proprium    195 

The  excess  of  them  even  not  hateful  to  God,  because  he  utilizes 

it  in  the  hells 198 

The  only  intolerable  evil  to  God  is  propriura,  selfhood,  or  self- 
righteousness 200 

Tor  this  is  spiritual  or  living  evil ;  and  fatal,  if  allowed,  to  the 

human  race    201 

The  church  alone  produces  this  desperate  evil  in  men  204 

Conscience  the  evidence  of  an  infinite  and  a  finite  struggle  in  our 

nature    206 

The  church  a  mere  rudimentary  exponent  of  conscience   208 

Change  of  plan 210 

LETTEE  XVII. 

Laws  of  the  spiritual  creation 211 

Spiritual  creation  inert  without  the  creature's  natural  constitution  214 


CONTENTS.  vii 


Implication  of  nature  in  creation  gives  it  all  its  interest  to  the  heart  218 

Spiritual  creation  interpreted  by  the  doctrine  of  evolution  220 

Difference  between  the  philosophic  and  the  scientific  idea  of  it 222 

Evolution  relatively  a  spiritual  flower ;  involution  its  natural  stem  22i 

Science  essentially  ministerial,  not  magisterial  to  the  mind  226 

Nature  neither  begins  nor  ends  anything  228 

LETTEE   XVIII. 

The  forte  and  foible  of  science 229 

Nature's  first  lesson  to  the  intellect    231 

Difference  between  physical  and  natural  existence 232 

The  philosopher  has  no  call  to  look  at  nature  outwardly  234 

Science  has  no  perception  of  the  spiritual  ends  of  nature,  and 

therefore  confounds  nature  with  physics 236 

It  claims  that  natural  existence  is  identical  with  spiritual  being  . . .  240 

Professor  Huxley  as  a  philosopher 242 

What  protoplasm  symbolizes  to  the  intellect 244 

Physicism  a  providential  gospel  246 

LETTEE  XIX. 

Swedenborg's  philosophy  of  nature 247 

Good  and  evil  the  mere  earth  of  the  finite  consciousness 250 

Heaven  and  hell  have  only  a  subjective  truth    252 

Subjective  genesis  of  hell  in  man 254 

Hell  is  always  heaven  to  the  evil  man  but  when  he  is  forced  not 

to  do  evil   256 

Human  nature  the  sole  sphere  of  creative  power  258 

LETTEE  XX. 

Creation  a  fusion  of  God  and  man  260 

It  includes  creator  and  creature  quite  equally   262 

Deism  as  a  philosophy  is  a  gross  absurdity    264 

Creation  consists  spiritually  in  divinizing  the  created  nature ;  and 

so  redeeming  it  from  the  power  and  taint  of  evU  266 


Vlll  CONTENTS. 


The  evil  of  human  nature  is  subjective  consciousness   270 

Man's  moral  evils  are  not  the  true  evil  of  his  nature 272 

That  consists  in  exteriorathig  the  creator  to  tlie  creature 274 

LETTEK  XXI. 

Illusory  genesis  of  selfhood 276 

Effect  of  the  illusion  in  necessitating  a  Divine-natural  order  of  life  278 

This  order  alone  releases  man  from  the  evils  incident  to  his  selfhood  280 

Superiority  of  living  knowledge  to  mere  science  for  creative  ends  282 

Science  or  learning  flatters  the  illusion  of  selfhood   284 

The  object  in  knowledge  glorifies  the  subject  out  of  self-conscious- 
ness      286 

The  rule  of  our  natural  knowledge  the  rule  of  our  natural  life 288 

Our  nature  —  what?  and  how  constituted  ?  290 

The  church's  testimony  to  the  Christian  facts 292 

The  realm  of  fact  inferior  to  the  realm  of  truth 294 

Unhappy  results  to  the  intellect  in  tetheriag  it  to  sense   296 

Attitude  of  men  of  science   298 

Difference  between  science  and  faith  299 

The  gospel  untrue  tidings  to  every  one  who  does  not  first  find  it 

good 300 

Man's  allegiance  henceforth  due  to  Divine-natural  good  alone 302 

LETTEK  XXII. 

The  state  culminates  in  the  republic  304 

The  republic  ends  our  political  life 306 

The  angels  an  imperfect  work  of  God 307 

Swedenborg's  indictment  of  the  angelic  personality  308 

He  shows  it  severely  ministerial  to  a  work  of  God  in  human  nature  310 

Man's  private  selfhood  the  only  inveterate  enemy  of  God 312 

Is  our  natural  alienation  from  God,  a  fact  of  science  ?  314 

Or  is  it  a  truth  of  our  personal  consciousness  merely  ? 316 

Our  inherited  theology  sottish  and  suffocating  318 

The  Drvine-naiural  humanity  alone  worthy  of  men's  acknowledg- 
ment    320 


CONTEXTS.  ix 


Selfhood  the  natural  birthmark  or  congenital  stigma  of  the  creature  322 

An  implication,  not  an  explication  of  the  spiritual  creation 324 

A  dense  mask  behind  which  God  effects  our  natural  redemption...  326 

A  mere  generalized  form  of  man's  natural  contrariety  to  God  328 

Impossible  to  believe  any  longer  in  God's  sMpenminval  attributes...  330 
God  a  practical  power  adequate  to  all  man's  natural  (or  impersonal) 

needs 332 

He  never  poses  for  men's  admiration 334 

LETTER  XXIII. 

A  higher  and  lower  order  of  knowledge  in  man 335 

Science  self-disqualiQed  as  a  research  of  being  338 

The  spiritual  being  of  things  distinct  from  their  natural  existence. . .  340 

We  achieve  the  love  of  our  kind  only  by  practically  unloving  self. . .  342 

Spiritual  creation  unreal  unless  based  in  the  created  nature 344 

Implication  of  the  creature's  nature  in  creation,  alone  makes  it  real  34G 

Swedenborg  describes  creation  as  a  house  of  three  stories 348 

Miracle  a  sensuous  symbol  of  the  creative  infinitude 350 

LETTEE  XXIV. 

Science  terrene,  sense  subterrene    352 

Essential  or  spiritual,  and  existential  or  natural,  Divine  manhood  354 

The  subjective  element  in  experience  intrinsically  evil  and  perishable  356 

Science  a  perpetual  strainer  for  the  imbecile  judgments  of  sense  ...  358 

Not  sense,  but  selfhood,  the  chief  obstacle  to  man's  spiritual  welfare  3G0 
Nirvana,  or  self-extinction,  impossible  to  created  or  self-conscious 

existence    362 

The  gospel  facts  worthless  save  as  a  revelation  of  God's  infinitude  364 
The  scientific  or  ontologic  hypothesis  of  being  fundamentally  stupid 

and  void 366 

How  man  realizes  immortality 368 

A  personal  reminiscence  369 

Anecdote  of  a  murderer's  mundane  post-mortem  perturbations 370 

No  degree  of  post-mortem  experience  equivalent  to  immortal  Ufe. . .  372 


CONTENTS. 


Immortality  depends  upon  no  personal  favour  of  God  to  us 374 

Christ's  unique  lustre,  that  he  despised  man's  moral  rigliteousness  376 
No  man  a  creature  of  God  in  his  own  right,  or  independently  of 

others    , 378 

God's  new  cliurch  a  thoroughly  new  natural  spirit  or  life  in  man...  3S0 

LETTER  XXV. 

Church  development  of  our  nature 382 

Christianity  spiritually  fulfilled  in  the  events  of  our  own  history . . .  384 

Christ's  spiritual  foes  are  they  who  greatly  exalt  his  finite  person  386 
Error  in  point  of  philosophy  of  the  moralist  or  statesman :  that  he 

thinks  civilization  based  upon  the  absoluteness  of  morality  ...  388 

The  church  primarily  and  inveterately  hostile  to  moralism  392 

The  latest  church  development  proves  its  utter  spiritual  decease...  394 

Our  highest  morality  claims  no  higher  sanction  than  prudence 396 

Moral  offences  not  contrary  to  nature  but  to  culture 398 

Meaning  of  our  civic  constitution   400 

It  is  a  mere  steward  of  man's  spiritual  destiny 402 

It  utterly  misapprehends  its  providential  function 404 

The  spiritual  form  of  our  nature  or  creation  is  social 406 

But  we  are  born  desperately  unsocial  or  selfish 408 

The  personal  illusion  sole  root  of  hell  in  us    410 

LETTER  XXVI, 

Moralist  and  churchman  defined 412 

The  root-error  in  both  the  same,  but  more  curable  in  the  former...  414 
It  is  more  superficial  in  the  one,  and  more  substantial  in  the 

other 416 

All  manner  of  sin  forgiven  to  men  but  that  against  the  Holy 

Ghost 418 

Self-righteousness  the  outgrowth  of  a  church-soil  in  our  nature  . . .  420 
Both  "the  church"  and  "the  world"  a  mere  germination  of  hu- 
man nature    422 

"  Church  "  and  "  world  "  a  distinctively  natural  development  in  man  424 

"Church"  Sind"yvor]di"  naturalieicts 426 


CONTENTS.  XI 


LETTER  XXVII. 

We  do  not  inherit  human  nature,  but  attain  to  it  by  regeneration  427 

Our  natural  history  is  a  divinely  redemptive  process 430 

Human  nature  is  a  universal  realm  of  consciousness  in  man 432 

Human  nature  not  the  spiritual  creation,  but  reveals  it    434 

She  fills  out  our  imreal  persons  with  valid  human  substance    436 

She  is  the  life  of  law  or  order  in  all  lower  existences 438 

She  is  inwardly  instinct  with  love  and  therefore  loathes  asceticism  440 

But  only  as  a  moral  force  she  shows  her  true  infiniting  tenderness  442 

LETTER  XXVIII. 

Human  nature  metaphysical    444 

God  alone  is  man  either  in  substance  or  in  form   446 

The  creative  power  iu  men  contingent  upon  their  nature  taking 

form   448 

Nature  the  sphere  of  redemption  in  man    450 

The  inward  meaning  of  creation  is  man's  deliverance  from  evil    ...  452 
Man's  freedom  and  rationality  do  not  make  him  man  :  they  merely 

qualify  him  to  become  man 454 

God  is  entirely  without  a  power  of  independent  action 458 

Our  moral  and  rational  manhood  not  a  real  but  a  typical  manhood  460 

Christ  crucified  the  only  adequate  revelation  of  God  in  humanity...  462 

The  church  and  the  world  purely  subjective  realities  in  man   464 

They  are  the  simple  machinery  of  our  natural  evolution   466 

The  existing  world-wide  tragedy  of  human  life  is  that  church  and 

world  persist  in  burrowing  in  men's  private  conscience 468 

States  no  sooner  become  united  than  society  is  inaugurated 472 

The  only  obstacle  to  God's  kingdom  is  the  hypocrisy  of  the  church  474 

The  late  collapsed  Mr.  Moody  or  present  distended  Mr.  Cook 476 

The  author  takes  an  affectionate  leave  of  his  correspondent,  by  a 

citation  from  Swedenborg 478 

Appendix  A 481 

Appendix  B. 

Proprium  or  selfhood,  the  source  of  all  evil   484 


LETTER    I. 


'Y  DEAR  ERIEND:  — You  know  that  I 
am  not  in  good  health.  Ever  since  my 
illness  of  last  May,  now  more  than  a 
year  ago,  my  nerves  are  easily  unstrung 
by  protracted  labor,  and  I  am  consequently  not 
very  sure  beforehand  that  I  can  meet  the  demands 
of  your  recent  letter  as  well  as  I  should  like  to. 
Still  I  am  persuaded  that  even  for  weary  nerves 
there  is  no  sedative  so  sovereign  as  the  reconciling 
truths  we  are  going  to  consider,  and  I  hope  there- 
fore that  our  conference  will  not,  on  the  whole, 
prove  tedious  or  enervating  to  either  of  us. 

I  will  quote  a  few  lines  of  your  letter  in  order 
that  by  my  comment  upon  them  I  may  pitch  the  tune 
of  our  subsequent  discussion,  or  indicate  the  har- 
monic issues  to  which  I  would  have  it  lead.  You 
say :  "I  cannot  bear  to  think  with  any  purpose  of 
my  private  regeneration  after  having  so  long  com- 
mitted all  my  Godward  hopes  to  the  destiny  of  my 


4  ANTAGONISM  BETWEEN  THE  IDEAS  OF 

race.  Least  of  all  should  I  be  likely  to  entertain 
that  question  just  now,  when  the  labors  of  Messrs. 
Moody  and  Sankey,  and  the  rhetoric  of  Rev.  Joseph 
Cook,  seem  providentially  intended  to  show  us  the 
vulgar  egotism  and  the  blatant  unbelief  in  the 
Divine  name,  with  which  it  is  almost  sure  to  be 
associated." 

Now  I  have  as  little  respect  for  Messrs.  Moody 
and  Sankey,  and  for  their  flashy,  histrionic  colleague, 
as  you  can  desire,  and  think  oui*  daily  papers  might 
easily  furnish  better  food  to  their  readers  than  the 
puerile  stuff  they  give  us  as  reports  of  these  men's 
sensational  sermons  and  lectures.  But  what  interests 
me  chiefly  in  the  extract  from  your  letter  is  the 
general  sentiment  of  preference  you  exhibit  for  a 
fixed  life  of  relation  to  God  over  one  of  a  free 
and  spiritual  character :  that  is,  for  a  life  of  passive 
submission  to  your  race-destiny,  over  one  of  active 
private  regeneration.  You  have  always  one  great 
merit,  that  of  knowing  well  your  own  mind.  But 
I  take  the  liberty  of  offering  you  a  few  considera- 
tions in  regard  to  this  sentiment  of  preference  you 
express,  which  perhaps  you  have  not  done  justice 
to,  and  which  may  therefore  lead  you  in  the  pres- 
ent case  to  an  improved  knowledge  of  your  own 
mind. 

Let  me  ask  you  then,  in  the  first  place,  what  good 


HUMAN  FREEDOM  AND   HUMAN  DESTINY.  5 

our  race-destiny  is  going  to  do  us  individually  ?  Our 
race-destiny  is  thoroughly  incapable,  I  am  happy  to 
say,  of  furnishing  a  destiny  for  the  individual  man. 
We  are  not  the  race,  but  individuals  embraced  in  it ; 
and  though  there  is  beyond  doubt  a  race-destiny  for 
man,  there  is  no  such  thing  as  an  individual  destiny. 
Human  individuality  is  constituted  by  freedom  and 
rationality;  and  if  therefore  a  certain  destiny  were 
imposed  upon  it  to  fulfil,  either  by  deity  or  demon, 
it  would  immediately  collapse.  If  I  am  really  des- 
tined to  undergo  a  certain  mental  development,  end- 
ing in  my  spiritual  manhood,  just  as  I  am  destined 
to  undergo  a  certain  physical  growth  ending  in  my 
natural  manhood,  it  must  be  because  I  have  no  self- 
hood—  that  is,  no  freedom  and  rationality  —  where- 
with to  work  out  my  spiritual  manhood.  In  short, 
to  have  a  fixed  "  destiny "  is  not  to  be  a  free  and 
rational  subject,  and  therefore  to  be  without  indi- 
viduality; and  to  be  without  individuality  is  to  be 
destitute  of  spiritual  possibilities,  and  claim  only  nat- 
ural. 

I  repeat,  then,  that  the  human  race  alone,  and  not 
any  individual  subject  of  it,  claims  a  Divine  "des- 
tiny," because  the  race  has  only  an  indefinite  or  uni- 
versal personality,  and  of  itself  therefore  is  only  fit 
to  minister  to  a  defined  or  individual  one.  But  the 
individual  man,  because  he  is  by  creation  free  and 


G  ANTAGONISM  BETWEEN  THE  IDEAS  OF 

rational,  is  ij)so  facto  the  arbiter  of  his  own  spirit- 
ual life  and  character :  that  is,  he  either  remains 
what  he  already  is  by  derivation  from  his  past  an- 
cestry, and  the  circumstances  of  his  own  position, 
or  else  he  becomes  a  new  and  regenerate  form  of 
life,  according  to  his  own  pleasure. 

Thus  your  and  my  private  regeneration  is  not  an 
outcome  of  destiny  in  any  sense  of  the  word.  No 
doubt,  we  may  picture  the  heart  of  God  as  very 
much  interested  in  every  man's  private  or  spiritual 
regeneration.  But  then  at  the  same  time  we  must 
take  extreme  good  care  not  to  represent  Him  as  in- 
terested in  it  to  the  extent  of  "destining"  any  of 
us  for  it,  as  the  sect  of  Universalists  holds ;  or  what 
is  the  same  thing,  imposing  it  upon  any  of  us  contrary 
to  his  own  good  will  and  pleasure ;  because  obviously 
that  would  be  to  represent  Him  as  violating  the 
express  means  He  has  appointed  for  bringing  it 
about,  and  so  defeating  the  realization  of  it.  For 
what  does  our  spiritual  regeneration  mean?  It 
means  —  our  new  birth,  or  our  getting  a  new  heart 
and  mind:  that  is,  a  different  one  from  that  we 
are  actually  born  to,  or  inherit  from  our  forefathers. 
As  this  old  heart  and  mind  take  place  in  us  with- 
out our  own  privity  or  consent  previously  asked,  so 
our  new  birth  signalizes  its  own  superior  lustre  or 
more  intimate  nearness  to  us,  by  conditioning  itself 


HUMAN  FREEDOM  AND  HUMAN  DESTINY.  7 

upon  our  private  freedom  and  rationality,  or  accom- 
modating itself  to  our  secret  hearts'  demands,  de- 
rived from  culture. 

This  is  what  to  every  man,  spiritually  exercised, 
makes  his  private  regeneration  a  question  of  such 
vital  moment,  namely :  that  his  deejped  instincts  of 
manhood  are  met  hy  it,  and  hy  it  alone.  For  ex- 
ample, my  inherited  personality  is  full  of  stain  or 
frailty  derived  from  some  or  other  of  my  progeni- 
tors, so  that  I  find  myself,  when  tempted,  not  only 
liable  but  sure  to  succumb  to  theft,  false  witness, 
adultery,  or  murder.  Now  in  this  state  of  things 
it  is  evident  that  unless  there  be  some  Divine  reve- 
lation in  our  nature  and  history  making  me  aware 
of  this  tendency  to  evil  in  me,  and  prompting  me 
to  combat  it,  I  am  as  good  as  gone  to  all  eternity. 
For  I  have  no  intuitive  conscience  of  the  difference 
between  good  and  evil,  but  only  an  empirical  or 
acquired  one.  As  far  as  my  personal  intuitions  go 
I  unhesitatingly  deem  good  evil  and  evil  good.  Our 
moral  conscience  is  a  Divine  endowment  of  our  na- 
ture exclusively,  utterly  beyond  the  sphere  of  our 
personal  intuitions  ;  and  we  come  into  the  experience 
of  it  accordingly  only  through  the  intercourse  of  our 
kind.  It  is  notorious  to  every  man  of  thoroughly 
educated  experience,  that  when  he  is  tempted  to  bear 
false  witness,  to  steal,  to  commit  adultery,  or  murder, 


8  ANTAGONISM   BETWEEN  THE  IDEAS   OF 

the  whole  pressure  of  the  temptation  lies  in  the  fact 
that  these  damnable  things  seem  ravishingly  good 
to  him  and  not  evil.  Other  men,  interested  in  pre- 
venting me  doing  them  may  denounce  them  as  evil. 
But  I  in  my  secret  heart,  when  tempted  by  these 
unhandsome  things,  cannot  help  pronouncing  them 
good,  the  most  intimate  and  exquisite  good  I  know, 
in  fact ;  and  I  inwardly  renounce  the  doing  of  them 
only  out  of  deference  to  the  Divine  law  forbid- 
ding me  to  do  them  under  penalty  of  death. 

I  repeat  then,  that  it  is  this  strictly  redemptive 
effort  of  God  in  our  nature,  which  alone  qualifies 
me  to  realize  my  deepest  human  instincts,  or  learn 
in  what  consists  my  true  freedom  and  rationality. 
Before  being  inwardly  born  —  before  being  spirit- 
ually quickened  —  I  have  no  misgiving  as  to  my 
appetites  and  passions  forming  in  me  only  a  condi- 
tional or  limited  good.  They  seem  so  much  my 
nearest  good,  that  I  feel  no  higher  exercise  of  free- 
dom or  selfhood  possible  to  me,  than  to  obey  them 
nnreservedly,  or  whenever  they  demand  satisfaction. 
And  I  have  no  sort  of  a  suspicion,  until  I  receive 
my  information  from  others,  that  I  am  then  mean- 
while, in  spite  of  my  apparent  selfhood  or  freedom, 
the  wretched  slave  of  my  personal  orgaiiization.  It 
seems  at  this  period  so  like  free  action  to  give  way 
to    my   appetites   and    passions   regardless    of    any 


HUMAN   FREEDOM  AND   HUMAN   DESTINY.  9 

higher  law,  and  my  nascent  unripe  sense  of  self- 
hood or  personality  is  so  fostered  by  it,  that  I  can- 
not help  yielding  for  a  while  to  the  deceptive  seem- 
ing :  but  it  is  wholly  a  seeming,  destitute  of  the 
least  vital  truth.  Sooner  or  later  this  felt  freedom 
—  this  apparent  rationality  of  mine  —  confess  them- 
selves a  burdensome  and  abject  servitude,  from  which 
there  is  no  release  but  in  the  fetterless  air  of  the  spir- 
itual world.  In  fact,  dear  friend,  our  inherited  self- 
hood or  freedom  —  the  selfhood  that  comes  to  us 
from  birth,  or  is  derived  to  us  from  our  special  an- 
cestry—  is  a  mere  provisional  base  for  a  Divinely- 
given  selfhood  or  personality,  which  comes  to  us 
through  the  natural  redemption  wrought  in  us  by 
the  Lord  Jesus  Christ :  and  it  is  literally  next  to 
nothing,  if  it  refuse  to  operate  as  such  base. 

Admitting  then  that  we  have  to  the  fullest  extent 
a  "destined"  or  unfree  life  of  God  in  our  race:  I 
ask  afresh  how  does  that  supply  the  wants  of  our 
free  spiritual  or  highest  culture?  And  can  a  man 
really  be  so  false  to  the  instincts  of  his  proper  man- 
hood as  deliberately  to  prefer  a  "destined"  hfe, 
even  at  the  Divine  hands,  to  one  of  freedom?  I 
know  my  good  friend  Emerson  has  long  been  sing- 
ing us  songs  set  to  this  indolent  tune,  and  that 
many  feebler  warblers  reflect  his  inspiration.  And 
I   know   besides,   that   our  orthodox   churches   give 


10  ANTAGONISM  BETWEEN  THE  IDEAS  OF 

out  SO  decrepid  a  doctrine  of  the  Divine  name,  and 
our  Unitarian  or  rationalistic  pulpits  in  their  turn 
reply  to  it  in  so  scant  and  penurious  a  strain, 
that  the  common  mind  has  grown  altogether  tired 
of  the  senseless  jangle,  and  prefers  to  take  its  very 
unexacting  religion  and  philosophy  at  the  hands  of  a 
poet,  and  that  too  a  pantheistic  one.  But  you  don't 
belong  to  the  common  or  scientific  crowd  of  men, 
shut  up  like  so  many  gregarious  sheep  to  the  pens 
of  sense.  You  are  a  person  first  of  all  of  sincere, 
original  thought,  taking  nothing  on  trust  from  other 
men,  despising  the  servile  limits  of  sensuous  obser- 
vation by  which  their  intellect  is  bound,  and  think- 
ing out  your  own  conclusions  according  to  the  free 
range  of  sympathy  and  intelligence  God  has  given 
you.  And  you  accordingly  can  never  permanently 
consent  to  sell  your  Divine  birthright  of  freedom, 
for  the  paltry  mess  of  pottage  these  respectable  senti- 
mentalists offer  you  under  the  name  of  "destiny." 
Besides,  so  active  an  intellect  as  yours  ought  by  this 
time  to  know  that  we  can  have  no  positive  but  only 
a  negative  action  upon  this  destined  life  of  our  race, 
because  our  race  interests  belong  exclusively  to  God, 
and  He  is  absolute  over  them.  We  have  no  power 
to  promote  our  race  destiny,  but  by  our  spiritual 
regeneration.  Everi/  man  lolio  becomes  regenerate  by 
abstaining  from   the   commission   of  evils,   in   virtue 


HUMAN  FREEDOM  AND  HUMAN  DESTINY.  11 

purely  of  their  contrariety  to  the  Divine  name,  does 
indirectly  promote  his  race-evolution,  lecause  he  ceases 
any  lonyer  actively  to  obstruct  and  retard  it.  Our 
natural  evolution,  or  our  race-destiny,  is  to  put  on 
Divine  form  and  order;  and  this  form  and  order 
undeniably  consist  in  each  man  seeking  supremely 
the  good  of  the  whole,  and  in  all  men  seeking 
supremely  the  good  of  each.  It  is  manifest  then  that 
the  regenerate  person  does  indirectly  promote  this 
race-evolution,  inasmuch  as  he  alone  freely  abstains 
from  conflict  with  his  fellowman.  But  this  is  all 
he  does  towards  it,  and  a  fortiori  all  and  more  than 
all  that  any  one  else  does  towards  it.  The  man  who 
lives  in  practically  selfish  relations  with  his  kind, 
seeking  himself  first  and  his  neighbor  last,  does  ab- 
solutely nothing  for  his  race  or  nature  but  retard 
its  due  and  orderly  evolution.  And  when  it  is 
evolved,  he  will  do  nothing  spiritually  to  promote 
its  well-being,  because  although  he  will  then  be  in- 
hibited from  any  moral  conflict  with  his  fellows,  he 
will  cultivate  no  spiritual  sympathy  with  them. 

What  then?  Do  I  urge  you  to  cherish  an  intel- 
lectual indifference  to  your  race-destiny?  God  for- 
bid !  I  should  in  so  doing  be  utterly  faithless  to 
my  own  best  inspiration.  I  find  it  unspeakably 
blessed  to  believe  that  there  is  a  'DWiiiQ-natnral 
destiny  for  man  slowly  but  surely  working  out,  which 


12  ANTAGONISM  BETWEEN  THE   IDEAS  OF 

no  spiritual  wickedness  in  high  places,  nor  any  per- 
sonal stupidity  and  egotism  on  our  part,  can  seri- 
ously compromise.  Why?  Because  this  benign 
conviction  gives  me  the  indispensable  stay  or  guar- 
antee which  my  meagre  individual  faith  and  hope  in 
God  demand  as  a  basis.  I  could  of  course  have  no 
spiritual  or  private  hope  for  myself  in  God,  unless 
it  were  built  upon  His  natural  or  public  mercy  to 
my  race :  for  how  shall  any  man  this  side  of 
hell  ever  deem  himself  a  fitter  object  of  the 
Divine  complacency  than  any  other  man,  especially 
than  all  men?  My  moral  freedom  —  my  freedom 
to  be  good  or  evil  at  my  pleasure,  subject  only  to 
what  is  due  to  other  men  —  is  full  of  the  divinest 
benignity  to  my  nature,  because  the  development  of 
that  nature  in  all  Divine  form  and  order  is  condi- 
tioned upon  it.  The  actual  distinction  of  heaven  and 
hell,  in  fact,  is  conditioned  upon  it;  which  distinc- 
tion is  no  less  vital  to  spiritual  order.  So  that  the 
interests  of  both  worlds,  natural  and  spiritual  alike, 
may  be  said  to  demand  it.  But  my  moral  freedom 
is  but  a  quasi  freedom  after  all,  and  therefore  how- 
ever it  may  condition  my  true  or  spiritual  freedom, 
is  heaven-wide  of  constituting  it.  My  moral  free- 
dom consists  in  my  ability,  under  the  pressure  of 
any  mercenary  motive,  to  abstain  from  false-witness, 
theft,  adultery,  and   murder.     My  spiritual  freedom 


HUMAN  FREEDOM  AND   HUMAN  DESTINY.  13 

endows  me  with  a  totally  new  motive  of  action, 
which  is  the  love  of  God  and  my  neighbor,  or  the 
power  of  immortal  life ;  and  so  not  only  enables  me 
to  abstain  with  disgust  from  these  unholy  things,  but 
to  do  with  relish  the  exact  opposite.  The  element 
of  will  or  choice  is  everything  in  the  moral  life,  and 
the  fussy  votaries  of  it  accordingly  are  absurdly  tena- 
cious of  their  personal  merit.  But  this  element  of 
will  or  choice  scarcely  enters  appreciably  into  the 
spiritual  life,  unless  into  the  lowest  forms  of  it ;  and 
in  all  the  higher  or  celestial  forms  it  is  unknown. 
I  rejoice  then  with  unspeakable  joy  in  this  order- 
ing of  our  natural  destiny  at  God's  hands  —  this 
final  and  decisive  adjustment  of  men's  outward  and 
warring  relations  —  because  in  the  first  place  it 
authenticates  every  deepest  breath  of  man's  regene- 
rate hope  and  aspiration  towards  God,  and  in  the 
second  place  forever  exempts  men  from  the  tempta- 
tion again  to  seek  their  own  welfare  by  the  methods 
of  vice  and  crime.  But  apart  from  these  considera- 
tions —  apart,  in  other  words,  from  its  power  to  illus- 
trate the  Divine  name  —  I  have  no  thought  nor  care 
about  our  natural  destiny.  Especially  when  invited 
to  regard  it,  as  so  many  men  at  this  day  do,  in  the 
light  of  a  full  satisfaction  to  men's  faith  and  hope 
in  God,  it  seems  to  me  inexpressibly  revolting.  For 
after  all  is  said  that  can  be  said,  it  is  a  mere  reduc- 


14  ANTAGONISM  BETWEEN  THE  IDEAS  OF 

tion  to  order  of  man's  natural  or  constitutional  life, 
with  the  •  spiritual,  functional,  or  infinite  side  of  his 
being  left  out.  And  are  men  content  to  deem  them- 
selves cattle,  that  they  expect  no  higher  boon  at  the 
hands  of  the  Divine  Natural  Humanity  but  an 
unexampled  provision  for  their  board  and  lodging? 
Understand  me  then,  and  understand  my  books. 
/  stronglij  ajjirm  a  Divine  destiny  —  a  Divine-nat- 
ural order — for  mankind,  hut  I  ajjirm  it  in  the  in- 
terest of  the  Divine  name  alone,  which  the  church 
obscures,  by  practically  cutting  off  men's  secular 
hope  towards  God,  unless  it  claims  a  sanctimonious 
basis.  In  short  I  have  no  interest  in  maintaining 
this  truth  of  a  Divinely  appointed  destiny  for  the 
race,  but  the  interest  of  Divine  justice  or  righteous- 
ness. Of  course  no  one  can  deny  that  it  is  infi- 
nitely pleasanter  to  think  of  men  living  together  in 
outward  harmony,  than  living  like  pigs  in  a  sty, 
where  every  one  is  bent  upon  grabbing  as  much 
as  he  can  from  his  neighbor,  or  pushing  away  his 
unfortunate  neighbor  from  the  trough  altogether. 
But  the  outward  order  of  human  life  is,  after  all, 
supremely  pleasant  to  me,  because  it  discloses  an 
eternal  Divine  rest  and  refreshment  for  the  inward 
man,  or  indicates  at  least  the  method  by  which  the 
individual  conscience  attains  to  spiritual  peace  in 
God.     If  our  natural  evolution  did  nothing  to  reveal 


HUMAN  FREEDOM  AND  HUMAN  DESTINY.  15 

and  guarantee  our  inward  and  immortal  joy  in  God, 
I  for  one  should  be  obdurately  indifferent  to  it.  If 
my  life  is  to  be  spiritually  snuffed  out  at  last,  I 
should  very  much  prefer  to  have  beforehand  no  nat- 
ural glimpse  of  peace  and  order,  arising  from  the 
Divine  subjugation  of  heaven  and  hell,  to  mislead 
me  into  making  false  inferences. 

I  have  now  said  nearly  enough  to  make  my  mean- 
ing on  this  subject  clearly  intelligible  to  you.  I  am 
not,  you  perceive,  the  least  indisposed  to  believe  that 
I  am  "  destined  "  by  the  Divine  providence  —  either 
in  my  own  person  or  the  persons  of  my  descend- 
ants—  to  the  possible  enjoyment  of  health,  wealth, 
and  all  manner  of  outward  prosperity,  in  the  evolu- 
tion of  a  final  natural  order  for  man  on  the  earth, 
or  the  development  of  a  united  race-personality.  But 
I  am  utterly  averse  to  believing  that  ''destiny''  has 
anij  the  least  hand  in,  or  jmwer  over,  my  inioard  rela- 
tions to  infinite  goodness  and  truth,  or  my  instinct  of 
spiritual  freedom.  Every  such  sentiment  indeed  I 
trample  under  foot  with  a  resolute  and  hearty  good 
will,  for  it  aims  to  obscure  the  very  central  glory  and 
most  dazzling  effulgence  of  the  creative  name.  Let 
me  here  say  besides,  very  briefly,  though  the  theme 
well  deserves  a  Letter  to  itself,  that  if  I  could  feel 
that  I  had  been  "destined"  to  love  goodness  and 
truth  in  spite  of  the  preternatural  sweetness  to  my 


16  "DESTINY"  FATAL  TO  NATURE  AS  WELL. 

heart  of  evil  and  falsity,  the  sentiment  of  an  inmost 
freedom  and  rationality  which  now  qualifies  my 
manhood,  would  instantly  wither  at  its  source, 
and  even  my  nature  disown  its  proper  life  or 
selfhood.  For  my  nature  derives  its  total  power 
to  function  from  the  spiritual  world,  and  if  you  ex- 
haust that  world  —  the  world  of  man's  substantial 
freedom  or  individuality  —  of  its  hold  upon  my  affec- 
tion and  faith,  you  a  fortiori  reduce  my  natural  life 
to  inanition,  and  relegate  me,  its  conscious  subject,  to 
instant  unconsciousness. 


LETTER    II. 


UT  our  (lifFerence,  according  to  your  own 
showing,  is  far  more  vital,  intellectually, 
than  any  we  have  yet  apprehended,  be- 
longing rather  to  the  realm  of  thour/U 
than  that  of  sentiment.  You  say,  for  example :  "  I 
am  told  on  every  hand  that  you  believe  in  Jesus 
Christ  as  the  only  God.  If  this  be  true  I  cannot 
help  expressing  my  disappointment."  And  then, 
after  saying  that  you  have  not  so  understood  my 
books,  you  continue  in  words  following :  "  You 
mean  by  Christ  more  than  any  one  human  person- 
ality. You  don't  identify  God  with  any  person 
whatever,  but  with  all  human  nature.  I  never 
should  suspect  you  of  the  narrowness  here  imputed 
to  you.  But  how  can  I  feel  sure  that  I  am  right 
about  your  belief,  when  all  your  readers  with  whom 
I  am  acquainted  feel  sure  that  I  am  wrong  ?  " 

My  books  are  too  small  a  thing  to  excite  contro- 
versy, but  at  least  let  me   express  my  mortification 


18  HISTORY  A  STRUGGLE  BETWEEN  MAN'S 

that  to  a  reader  of  your  perspicacity  they  should 
have  borne  an  uncertain  sound  on  the  point  in  ques- 
tion. This  comes  in  part  perhaps  of  your  overlook- 
ing the  sharp  discrimination  I  habitually  make 
between  nature  and  person,  or  between  what  is  real 
and  what  is  merely  phenomenal  in  human  existence ; 
but  I  must  confess  that  on  the  whole  your  criticism 
is  damaging  to  my  self-love.  Let  me  then  try  again 
to  expose  to  you  the  philosophic  ground  of  my  con- 
victions on  this  subject,  and  to  this  end  indulge  me 
with  a  brief  backward  glance  at  the  history  of  the 
human  mind,  by  way  of  getting  a  starting-point  com- 
prehensive enough  to  show  in  the  sequel  where  the 
philosophic  truth  comes  in. 

Since  time  began  two  races  have  struggled  fol-  pre- 
cedence in  the  womb  of  humanity,  one  of  which  we 
may  call  the  child  of  bondage,  the  other  the  child 
of  freedom ;  one  embodying  the  interests  of  man's 
outward  or  conscious  life,  the  other  those  of  his  in- 
ward or  unconscious  life ;  one  representing  his  nat- 
ural or  race-force,  the  other  his  spiritual  or  personal 
force.  In  history  this  antagonism  in  human  thought 
and  life  has  been  variously  symbolized  :  now  as  the 
actual  or  old  Jerusalem  in  contrast  with  a  new  Jeru- 
salem which  is  yet  to  come ;  now  as  a  legal  Divine 
economy  in  opposition  to  a  gracious  one;  now  as  a 
visible  or  figurative  order  of  human  life  in  opposi- 


EACE  FORCE  AND  HIS  PERSONAL  FORCE.     19 

tion  to  an  invisible  or  real  order;  finally  and  in 
brief,  as  the  icorld  and  the  church. 

"  The  world "  and  "  the  church,"  then,  have  been 
symbols  of  thought  to  man,  growing  out  of  the  fun- 
damental needs  of  his  intellect :  what  precise  intel- 
lectual needs  do  these  opposing  symbols  attest  or 
stand  for? 

"  The  world"  represents  the  interests  of  human 
universality  —  say  human  nature  in  short;  "the 
church"  represents  the  interests  of  human  individu- 
ality—  say  human  regeneration,  in  short.  Thus  we 
may  say  that  the  icorld  stands  for  the  fatal  side  of 
human  life,  those  interests  of  man  which  relate  him 
willy-nilly  to  his  fellowman,  and  therefore  place 
him  more  or  less  in  the  voluntary  category,  or  under 
the  rule  of  duty,  of  force,  of  necessity,  of  destiny. 
And  tlte  church  on  the  other  hand  symbolizes  the 
free  side  of  human  life,  those  interests  of  man  which 
relate  him  primarily  to  his  infinite  source,  and  which 
exalt  him  therefore  into  the  category  of  spontaneity, 
or  express  —  all  duty  done  and  all  destiny  achieved 
—  the  reign  thenceforth  of  taste,  of  culture,  of  in- 
ward attraction  or  delight,  of  immortal  life  in  short. 
Human  regeneration  is  doubtless  the  sole  spiritual 
end  of  God's  creative  providence ;  as  the  human  race 
is  its  sole  incidental  natural  end.  And  as  the  highest 
Divine  blessing  for  the  regenerate  man  is  freedom, 


20  THE   STRUGGLE   IS  INHERENT 

SO  the  highest  Divine  blessing  for  the  race  is,  inci- 
dentally, an  order  competent  to  secure  such  freedom. 
But  I  repeat  that  we  cannot  be  too  particular  in 
denying  "the  world"  and  "the  church"  any  final 
validity,  and  restricting  them  to  a  purely  symbolic 
virtue.  In  their  material  or  technical  aspect  they 
are  plainly  irrelevant  to  the  grand  ideas  they  sym- 
bolize :  what  calls  itself  "  the  church,"  for  example, 
being  notoriously  so  devoted  to  the  pretence  of  order, 
as  to  carry  it  to  the  pitch  of  ritualism  or  supersti- 
tion ;  and  what  calls  itself  "  the  world"  so  devoted 
to  the  pretence  of  freedom  as  to  run  it  into  radical- 
ism, so  contemning  the  order  which  alone  saves  free- 
dom from  license.  Nevertheless  in  their  symbolic 
character  they  have  been  of  incalculable  succulence 
to  the  intellect,  as  without  the  vital  contrast  and 
oppugnancy  which  they  have  always  represented  to 
human  thought,  human  progress  would  have  proved 
abortive,  or  perished  in  its  cradle. 

And  now  having  secured  our  needful  starting- 
point  in  the  brief  historic  generalization  here  given, 
it  only  remains  to  inquire  further  in  this  connection 
why  this  sharp  discrimination  between  nature  and 
spirit,  or  between  the  universal  and  individual  in- 
terest in  human  life,  should  have  been  so  vital  to 
the  mind,  as  to  make  all  history  resound  with  it  ? 

To  tell  the  great  truth  in  one  very  brief  word: 


m  MAN'S  CREATURESHIP.  21 

it  is  because  man  is  the  creature  of  God,  and  is  essen- 
tially therefore  a  divided  personality ;  one  aspect  of  it 
relating  him  to  his  own  nature  or  his  fellow-man, 
so  giving  him  conscious  or  finite  and  phenomenal 
existence ;  the  other  aspect  of  it  relating  him  to  God 
or  his  spiritual  source,  so  giving  him  real  or  uncon- 
scious and  infinite  being.  Understand  me.  If  man 
be  in  truth  a  creature  of  God,  then  two  things  be- 
come at  once  necessary:  1.  That  he  possess  real  or 
unconscious  being  only  in  God ;  and  2.  That  he 
possess  conscious  or  phenomenal  existence  exclusively 
in  himself.  Because  if  his  real  or  unconscious  being 
were  not  in  God  but  in  himself,  then  he  himself 
would  instantly  cease  to  exist  or  appear;  and  if  his 
conscious  or  phenomenal  existence  were  not  in  him- 
self but  in  God,  then  he  would  himself  instantlij  cease 
to  he.  In  the  one  case  he  would  forfeit  natural  ex- 
istence; in  the  other  he  would  forfeit  spiritual 
being. 

This  fact,  then,  of  man's  creatureship  —  that  is,  the 
bare  fact  that  his  real  being  lies  in  the  Divine  perfec- 
tion, and  that  he  only  claims  in  himself  phenomenal 
or  unreal  existence  —  requires  that  his  history  pre- 
sent that  duality  of  movement  which  exhibits  him 
now  as  a  spiritual  or  individual  force,  now  as  a  natu- 
ral or  universal  one.  Accordingly  it  is  sheerly  im- 
possible to  deal  with  man  intelligently  or  intelligibly 


22  HIS  SPIRITUAL  CREATION  EXACTS 

upon  any  other  logical  basis  than  this  of  his  crea- 
tureship :  that  is  to  say,  upon  the  basis  of  his  refer- 
ring his  true  or  spiritual  being  infinitely  away  from 
himself,  namely :  to  God ;  and  claiming  to  himself 
instead  a  mere  natural,  phenomenal,  or  shadowy  ex- 
istence. At  all  events  this  is  the  view  which  I  find 
myself  forced  to  take  of  man's  being  and  history, 
that  is,  of  his  spiritual  origin  and  his  natural  des- 
tiny; and  it  is  especially  the  view  which  I  shall 
try  to  enforce  throughout  the  present  letters. 

Very  well  then :  so  far  at  least  there  is  no  room 
for  misunderstanding.  No  one  can  deny  that  his- 
tory demonstrates  a  divided  empire  in  man.  Every 
man  of  experience  or  observation  knows  that  man 
is  subject  to  a  double  law,  one  outward,  natm-al,  con- 
stitutional, so  to  speak,  relating  him  whether  he  will 
or  not  to  his  fellow-man ;  the  other  inward,  spirit- 
ual, creative,  so  to  speak,  relating  him  freely  to  God. 
The  first  of  these  laws  has  respect  to  man  as  a  whole, 
or  in  a  universal  aspect,  obeying  the  empire  of  neces- 
sity. The  second  has  respect  to  him  only  in  his  in- 
dividual capacity,  obeying  the  inspiration  of  freedom. 
I  repeat  then :  so  far  there  is  no  ground  for  misun- 
derstanding between  us. 

But  now  I  am  going  to  say  something  which  per- 
haps neither  experience  nor  observation  has  made 
plain  to  you,  and  which  may  therefore  give  rise  to 


HIS  PREVIOUS  NATURAL  FORMATION.  23 

misunderstanding,  if  I  do  not  very  fully  explain  my- 
self. You  know  that  I  have  traced  the  fact  of  man's 
divided  existence  to  the  truth  of  his  creatureship, 
which  requires  on  the  one  hand  that  he  possess  spir- 
itual or  invisible  being  in  his  Creator,  and  on  the 
other  natural  or  visible  existence  in  himself.  Because 
if  man  possessed  only  spiritual  being  in  his  Creator, 
he  would  be  without  any  ground  of  consciousness  in 
himself,  and  hence  without  any  recognition  of  the  dif- 
ference between  him  and  God.  And  if  he  possessed 
only  natural  or  visible  existence  in  himself,  he  would 
manifestly  be  uncreated.  At  all  events  he  would 
then  have  no  pretension,  as  now,  to  deem  himself 
the  creature  of  an  infinite  power.  I  do  not  hesitate 
to  say  therefore  that  his  peculiar  creatureship  implies 
this  double  bond  of  spiritual  or  infinite  being,  and  of 
natural  or  finite  existence. 

But  if  such  be  the  implication  of  man's  creature- 
ship, the  phenomenon  must  of  course  attribute  itself 
to  something  in  the  creative  perfection.  There  is  ob- 
viously nothing  in  the  creature  which  has  not  its  sole 
raison  d'etre  in  the  greatness  of  the  Creator ;  and  if 
we  would  ascertain  accordingly  why  it  is  that  man 
has  always  worn  a  divided  aspect  —  here  exalting 
himself  above  the  neighbor,  there  subjecting  himself 
to  the  neighbor  —  we  must  seek  our  answer  only  in 
the   excellence   of  the   creative    name.     Let  us   ask 


24  TO  WHAT  CREATIVE  EXCELLENCY 

therefore,  to  what  essential  excellence  of  the  crea- 
tive name  it  is  owing,  that  man,  its  creature,  should 
inevitably  wear  to  himself  a  finite  and  phenomenal 
aspect,  or  feel  a  conscience  of  limitary  relations  with 
God  and  his  fellow-man? 

It  is  owing  very  obviously  to  nothing  else  than 
the  infinitude  of  the  creative  Love :  which  requires 
that  the  Creator  in  creating  or  imparting  life  to  His 
creatm^es  should  first  of  all  endow  them  with  self- 
hood, or  subjective  consciousness,  in  order  that  such 
consciousness  in  giving  them  quasi  or  phenomenal 
projection  from  Himself,  may  ever  after  serve  them 
as  an  infallible  negative  basis  or  mirror  of  all  posi- 
tive Divine  knowledge.  And  selfhood,  or  subjec- 
tive consciousness,  being  contingent  as  it  is  upon 
the  perception  of  a  controlling  object,  in  relation  to 
which  alone  it  is  either  good  or  evil,  we  have  the 
entire  moral  history  of  the  race  provided  in  this 
antagonism  of  inward  and  outward,  subject  and  ob- 
ject, man  and  nature,  which  is  incidental  to  the  very 
idea  of  creation. 

But  here  you  will  ask  me  to  be  more  explicit. 
You  will  ask  me  to  explain  to  you  in  a  less  cursory 
manner  than  I  have  done  in  the  last  paragraph,  why 
the  infinitude  of  the  Creator  requires  Him,  as  I 
have  said,  to  endow  His  creature  with  selfhood,  or 
subjective   life?      To  answer  this  we   must   take  a 


IS  THIS  EXACTION  OWING?  25 

new  Letter.  Permit  me,  however,  meanwhile  to  say, 
that  after  the  frank  exposition  ah'eady  given  you 
can  have  no  longer  any  excuse  for  doubting  that 
I  at  least,  whatever  others  may  do,  not  only  value 
human  freedom  in  its  higher  aspect,  as  the  culminat- 
ing miracle  of  the  spiritual  creation,  or  what  alone 
renders  the  creative  name  eternally  adorable ;  but 
regard  it  also,  in  its  practical  aspect,  as  the  highest 
blessing  capable  of  being  bestowed  by  God  upon 
man :  as  that  blessing  indeed  which  alone  keeps  every 
other  blessing  from  becoming  nauseous.  Not  moral 
or  finite  freedom  —  not  a  mere  freedom  of  choice 
between  good  and  evil,  though  this  is  of  inestimable 
value  as  a  basis  of  the  other  —  but  a  positive  or  infi- 
nite freedom,  which  is  without  any  ratio  or  limit, 
being  identical  with  God's  own  presence  in  the 
created  nature,  and  is  felt  in  the  created  bosom, 
therefore,  as  the  spontaneous  prompting  of  its  own 
spirit. 


LETTER   III. 


^Y  DEAR  FRIEND:  — To  our  natural, 
uneducated  apprehension  of  Divine  things, 
a  proper  inference  from  God's  spiritual 
infinitude  or  perfection  would  be,  that  He 
might  at  once  bestow  what  life  He  listed  upon  His 
creatures :  if  need  were,  a  real  and  imperishable  one. 
But  an  enlightened  reason  teaches  us  that  every  such 
judgment  is  superstitious  or  profane,  springing  from 
grossly  sensuous  notions  of  the  Divine  infinitude. 
We  naturally  think  of  God  as  the  power  of  an  out- 
ward life,  and  measure  His  good-will  by  his  readi- 
ness to  bestow  all  manner  of  outward  prosperity 
upon  His  favorites.  But  He  is  in  truth  and  pre- 
eminently the  power  of  an  inward  life  in  man :  that 
is  to  say,  a  life  so  little  accentuated  to  the  senses 
as  to  seem  more  innocent  than  infancy :  and  where 
there  is  no  susceptibility  in  man  to  this  inward 
life,  His  power  of  outward  benefaction  is  thwarted. 
It  is  these  sensuous  prejudices  of  ours  with  respect 


THE  MEANING  OF  INFINITE  LOVE.  27 

to  the  Divine  power  which  lead  us  to  put  such  an 
exaggerated  estimate  as  we  do  upon  the  gift  of  self- 
hood, as  the  suni  of  all  God's  outward  bounty  to 
the  race;  when  the  gift  in  question  is  without  any 
objective  reality,  being  one  of  pure  subjective  seem- 
ing. We  want  to  know  accordingly  what  precise 
exigency  of  the  creative  infinitude  or  perfection  it 
is,  which  thus  prevents  the  omnipotent  Creator  from 
fully  authenticating  the  selfhood  of  man,  or  making 
him  (in  himself)  anything  but  a  mere  form  of  sub- 
jective or  seeming  life.  In  other  words  our  present 
business  is  to  consider  the  creative  infinitude,  in  order 
to  ascertain  the  ground  of  its  signal  incapacity  to  con- 
fer upon  its  creatures  (in  themselves)  any  other  than 
a  subjective,  personal,  finite,  or  phenomenal  conscious- 
ness. 

We  are  in  the  habit  of  saying  that  God  the  Cre- 
ator is  infinite  Love,  but  I  doubt  whether  we  are 
as  prompt  to  understand  all  that  is  implied  either 
in  the  qualifying  adjective  or  the  qualified  noun. 
We  say,  indeed,  that  the  Creator  is  Love,  because 
He  manifestly  communicates  life  or  being  to  other 
existences,  who  can  have  no  manner  of  claim  upon 
Him  but  what  they  derive  from  His  own  bountifid 
nature.  But  when  we  say  His  love  is  infinite,  do 
we  do  so  only  by  way  of  characterizing  its  pure 
quality,  as  being  unalloyed  by  any  fibre  of  self-love ; 


28  IT  MEANS,  FREEDOM  FROM  SELF-LOVE, 

that  is  to  say,  by  any  sentiment  of  conflict  between 
Himself  and  others?  Obviously  there  can  be  no 
essential  or  substantial  conflict  to  the  creative  intel- 
ligence between  Himself  and  His  creatures,  since 
He  furnishes  their  sole  and  total  being  or  substance. 
And  any  conflict  which  does  ensue  between  them, 
therefore,  must  be  purely  formal  or  phenomenal,  ex- 
isting to  the  created  apprehension  alone,  and  in- 
volving no  compromise  of  the  creative  infinitude. 
This  is  accordingly  the  only  ground  of  our  ascrib- 
ing infinitude  or  perfection  to  the  creative  Love : 
that  it  is  ineffably  pure  love,  or  love  so  wholly  un- 
like ours,  as  to  be  absolutely  free  from  any  set-off 
or  drawback  of  self-love,  or  even  of  transient  self- 
regard.  We  say  a  thing  is  wfnite,  which  has  no 
subjective  limitation,  no  limitation  ab  intra.  And 
we  say  it  is  absolute,  as  having  no  objective  limita- 
tion, no  limitation  ab  extra.  Now  the  Creator  is 
in  se,  or  essentially,  both  infinite,  as  being  void  of 
subjective  relations ;  and  absolute,  as  being  void  of 
objective  relations ;  and  it  is  only  in  His  existential 
relations  to  the  finite  understanding  of  His  own 
creatures,  that  we  apply  these  terms  to  Him,  in 
order  to  express  our  approximate  sense  of  His  per- 
fect being,  and  so,  in  the  best  way  we  know  how, 
differentiate  Him  from  ourselves. 

Now   this   infinitude   of  the   Creator  constituting 


AND  HENCE  STAMPS  SELF-LOVE  UNREAL.  29 

Him  (in  Himself)  the  all  of  being  that  exists,  stamps 
the  creature  {m  himself)  a  mere  appearance  or  im- 
age of  being,  an  abject  phenomenal  form  or  sem- 
blance of  being,  without  a  particle  more  reality  in 
itself  than  the  shadow  which  your  or  my  person 
projects  upon  the  ground,  has  in  itself:  that  is,  no 
philosophic,  but  a  mere  sensible  or  scientific  reality. 
The  creature  exists  sensibly  to  himself  no  doubt,  and 
therefore  claims  to  himself  a  scientific  reality;  but 
this  existence,  at  best,  is  a  strictly  phenomenal  or 
contingent  existence,  requiring  an  objective  base  or 
background  to  give  it  projection,  or  render  it  con- 
scious. The  creature  is  rendered  self-conscious  by 
virtue  of  his  subjection  to  his  own  body,  or  the  out- 
lying world  inherent  in  his  bodily  senses ;  and  so 
far  of  course  is  an  authentic  datum  of  science.  But 
the  inferiority  of  science  to  sense  as  a  basis  of  spir- 
itual culture  is  signally  evinced  by  the  fact,  that 
the  testimony  of  sense  is  indisputable,  while  that 
of  science  is  nothing  if  not  disputable.  Sense  gives 
us  all  the  existence  we  know ;  science  deals  with  the 
inferences  or  judgments  which  such  existence  renders 
probable,  and  hence  presents  an  every  way  unstable 
or  perilous,  not  to  say  impossible,  base  to  men's  spir- 
itual culture.  For  if  spiritual  truth  is  built,  not 
upon  the  solid  rock  of  natural  fact,  but  upon  the 
shifting  sands  of  men's  opinion,  it  would  be  absurd 


30  INFERIORITY  OF  SCIENCE  TO   PHILOSOPHY 

for  US  to  attempt  cultivating  or  even  cherisliing  it, 
as  it  could  never  get  body  enough  to  become  recog- 
nized by  us,  let  alone  loved. 

In  spite,  then,  of  the  scientific  authentication  it 
claims  —  rather,  let  me  say,  in  virtue  of  such  au- 
thentication —  created  existence  must  be  of  a  purely 
contingent,  phenomenal,  conscious  character ;  that  is 
to  say,  can  never  be  thought  to  include  in  itself  its 
own  being  or  substance.  To  make  it  include  its 
own  being  or  substance  would  be  to  pronounce  it 
uncreated,  in  which  case  it  would  no  longer  be  a 
product  of  infinite  power  but  would  itself  possess 
infinitude.  Creature  would  become  converted  into 
creator,  in  short :  than  which  nothing  more  needs 
be  said  to  demonstrate  the  logical  absurdity  of  the 
position.  The  exact  infirmity  of  science,  regarded 
as  a  final  or  proper  intellectual  discipline  of  man,  is 
that  it  is  bound  by  its  own  limitation  to  ignore  crea- 
tion, or  make  no  account  of  the  distinctively  Divine 
implication  in  existence.  This  must  forever  estab- 
blish  its  essential  inferiority  to  philosophy  as  an  in- 
tellectual cidtus.  For  the  precise  and  characteristic 
research  of  philosophy  is  just  that  spiritual  or  crea- 
tive element  in  all  existence  which  science  is  bound 
by  the  interests  of  self-preservation  to  overlook.  Phi- 
losophy is  nothing  but  a  pursuit  of  the  essential  ends 
and   causes   that   underlie  and   explain   phenomena. 


AS  AN  INTELLECTUAL  CULTURE.        31 

Science  confines  herself  only  to  phenomena  and  their 
relations,  that  is,  to  what  is  strictly  verifiable  in  some 
sort  by  sense ;  and  so  stigmatizes  the  pursuit  of  being 
or  substance  as  fatal  to  her  fundamental  principles. 
Philosophy,  in  short,  is  the  pm*suit  of  Truth,  super- 
sensuous  truth,  recognizable  only  by  the  heart  of 
the  race,  or  if  by  its  intellect,  still  only  through 
a  life  and  power  derived  from  the  heart. '  Science 
has  no  eye  for  truth,  but  only  for  Fact,  which  is  the 
appearance  that  truth  puts  on  to  the  senses,  and  is 
therefore  intrinsically  second-hand,  or  shallow  and 
reflective.!  To  derive  one's  chief  intellectual  nur- 
ture from  science,  consequently,  would  be  as  unwise 
as  to  seek  to  know  a  man  through  a  persistent  study 
of  his  old  clothes.  It  is,  accordingly,  a  truth  no 
way  surprising  to  Philosophy  that  the  creature,  quel  a 
creature,  must  be  absolute  nought  in  se,  and  become 
both  conscious  and  cognizable  only  by  virtue  of  the 
creative  being  or  substance  dwelling  in  him  as  him- 
self: that  is,  in  spiritually  despised,  rejected  and  cru- 
cified form.  For  the  Creator  in  order  to  communi- 
cate His  own  wealth  of  being  to  the  creature,  is  first 
obliged  to  give  the  creature  a  quasi  or  supposititious 
standing  before  Him,  by  making  him  at  least  self- 
conscious,  or  phenomenal  to  himself;  and  then  by 
gradually  revealing  to  him  the  abysmal  death  that 
is  incident  to  this  quasi  or  finite  existence,  win  him 


32  MAN  UNREAL  IN  SE,   AND  MADE  REAL 

to  that  hearty  disgust  of  himself  which  is  the  inex- 
pugnable condition  of  his  knowledge  of — and  sin- 
cere relish  for —  Divine  things. 

I  have  shown  you  then  that  the  creative  power 
is  inhibited  by  its  own  strict  infinitude  or  perfec- 
tion, from  allowing  its  creature  any  life  more  real 
than  that  of  selfhood,  or  mere  subjective  seeming : 
because  to  do  this  would  be  to  disjoin  its  creature 
from  itself,  or  render  him  independent  of  his  sole 
source  of  life.  I  confess  I  do  not  see  how,  if  you 
acknowledge  the  truth  of  creation  at  all,  but  espe- 
cially acknowledge  it  to  be  spiritual  or  living,  you 
can  help  agreeing  with  what  I  have  said.  And  if 
you  agree  with  me  that  man  —  being  a  creature  — 
is  not,  and  in  the  very  nature  of  things,  can  never 
be,  his  own  spiritual  being  or  substance :  then,  as 
it  strikes  me,  the  main  obstacle  will  be  removed  to 
our  general  agreement  in  the  fundamental  postulate 
of  Christianity,  which  is  the  sole  Divinity  of  Christ's 
Humanity.  That  is  to  say,  we  shall  both  alike  be 
able  to  perceive,  that  as  all  men  like  you  and  me 
naturally  feel  that  personal  or  egoistic  substance 
(being  the  least  material  or  most  vitalized  substance 
they  know)  is  veritable  Divine  substance,  and  does 
really  constitute  their  own  deeply  recognized  and 
highly  prized  Divine  being :  so  the  most  urgent  obli- 
gation which  this  natural  hallucination  of  the  created 


ONLY  BY  NATURAL  REDEMPTION.        33 

intelligence  imposes  upon  the  Creator,  is  eventually 
to  redeem  His  creature  from  the  overpowering  bond- 
age of  self,  and  the  utter  spiritual  blight  it  en- 
genders, by  fully  incarnating  His  own  perfection  in 
the  nature  of  the  creature,  and  from  that  "coign  of 
'vantage"  gradually  glorifying  the  consciousness  of 
the  latter  out  of  personal  into  race  dimensions;  out 
of  selfish  into  social  form  and  order. 

Now  I  shall  not  affront  your  self-respect  by  affect- 
ing to  demonstrate  the  truth  of  God's  natural 
humanity  scientifically :  in  the  first  place,  because 
it  is  not  a  fact  of  sense,  and  therefore  escapes  the 
supervision  of  science;  and  in  the  second  place,  be- 
cause in  all  this  correspondence,  I  am  anxious  to 
conciliate  your  heart  primarily,  while  your  head  is 
quite  a  subordinate  aim.  I  cannot  tell  you  a  single 
reason,  unprompted  by  the  heart,  why  I  myself  be- 
lieve the  truth  in  question,  or  any  other  truth  for 
that  matter ;  and  so  far  as  my  own  pleasure  is  con- 
cerned, accordingly,  I  would  not  give  a  fig  for  your 
acknowledgment  of  it,  if  the  acknowledgment  did  not 
betray  a  like  cordial  source.  In  fact,  I  believe  it 
simply  because  I  love  it,  or  it  seems  adorably  good 
to  me;  and  once  having  learned  to  love  it,  I  could 
not  do  without  it.  It  would  in  truth  kill  me,  intel- 
lectually, to  doubt  it.  So  you  see  I  am  at  least  dis- 
interested  in   my  advocacy  of  the  truth.     I  recom- 


34  PRIMACY   OF  THE   HEART   IN  BELIEF. 

mend  it  to  you  for  its  own  sake  exclusively,  and  not 
at  all  for  yours.  It  may  indeed,  for  aught  I  know, 
prove  as  odious  to  you  as  it  is  precious  to  me ;  and 
God  forbid  that  I  should  take  it  upon  me  to  say 
you  nay,  Avhatever  way  your  heart  inclines  you.  To 
my  experience  this  is  the  only  thing  that  in  the  long 
run  authenticates  truth  to  the  intellect  —  the  heart's 
sincere  craving  for  it.  I  find  that  truth  unloved  is 
always  at  bottom  truth  unbelieved,  however  much  it 
may  be  "professed."  In  short,  I  am  persuaded 
that  there  is  no  more  galling  bondage  known  to  the 
intellect,  than  that  of  truth  unsanctioned  and  unsoft- 
ened  by  affection ;  and  I  don't  the  least  wonder  at 
Swedenborg  —  when  describing  men  in  a  freer  world 
than  this,  however  —  saying  that  they  willingly 
plunge  into  the  depths  of  hell  to  be  rid  of  it. 


"^   "    "    ■'    *'    "    "    " 


I  II  i»  a 


LETTER   IV. 


*REE  your  mind,  then,  at  once  and  utterly, 
so  far  as  I  am  concerned,  of  all  apprehen- 
sion of  being  reasoned  into  truth,  or  hav- 
ing your  understanding  coerced  against 
your  heart's  consent.  Ratiocination  is  doubtless  an 
honest  pastime,  or  it  would  not  be  so  much  in  vogue 
as  a  means  of  acquiring  truth.  But  the  truth  we 
are  elucidating  is  Divine,  and  therefore  is  great 
enough  to  authenticate  itself,  or  furnish  its  own  evi- 
dence. Divine  truth,  to  be  sure,  must  always  be 
unpopular  or  out  of  fashion,  so  long  as  God  is  the 
simply  merciful  or  magnanimous  being  He  is.  But 
if  it  had  to  be  acquired  at  the  same  cost  to  mind 
and  body  that  scientific  truth  exacts,  —  if  the  result 
involved  an  equally  wide  field  of  sensible  induction, 
an  equally  studious  observation  of  particulars,  the 
same  painstaking  investigation  of  evidence,  and  the 
same  power  to  formulate  a  just  conclusion,  —  there 
would  be  still  fewer  persons  to  pursue  it,  and  com- 


36  DIVINE  TRUTH  HAS  FIRST  TO  CREATE 

paratively  few  of  these  again  would  feel  very  secure 
of  their  results. 

But  the  case  is  widely  dififerent.  Divine  truth, 
simply  because  it  is  Divine,  has  first  to  create  the 
intelligence  that  recognizes  it,  and  therefore  releases 
its  votaries  from  that  costly  and  toilsome  research 
which  is  demanded  by  science.  It  takes  nature  or 
the  senses  for  granted,  and  the  will  and  understand- 
ing in  man :  but  that  is  the  sum  of  its  exactions. 
For  it  propagates  itself  by  the  method  of  Revelation 
exclusively :  that  is,  by  gradually  unveiling  to  human 
intelhgence  the  spiritual  sense  or  meaning  which  is 
latent  in  all  natural  symbols :  and  hence  desiderates 
no  preparation  in  its  disciples  but  a  modest  and 
docile  intelligence.  Its  entire  aim  is  to  lay  a  foun- 
dation for  men's  spiritual  life,  by  first  disabusing 
them  of  their  sensuous  prejudices,  and  the  selfish, 
untender  science  which  is  begotten  of  these;  and 
consequently  it  makes  no  direct  appeal  to  their  con- 
ceited intelligence,  but  seeks  to  cure  their  spiritual 
disability  by  first  purifying  their  hearts  of  the  evil 
loves  which  engender  it. 

Thus  the  sole  disciplinary  apparatus  of  Divine 
Truth  is  detergent  or  purgative,  being  fully  embodied 
in  the  ten  commandments.  He  would  very  grossly 
mistake  the  purpose  of  "the  moral  law,"  as  we 
term   it,   which  is  the  basis  of  our  existing  civili- 


THE  INTELLIGENCE  IT  AFTERWARDS  ENLIGHTENS.      37 

zation,  who  should  fail  to  discern  its  intensely  spirit- 
ual animus,  as  intended  above  all  things  to  bring 
about  a  change  of  heart  in  the  votary.  By  the  irre- 
sistible bent  of  their  finite  nature  the  affections  of 
men  are  obdurately  set  upon  perishing  things,  and 
the  main  design  of  the  law  therefore  is  to  convince 
them  of  this  death-bearing  nature  they  carry  about 
in  themselves,  and  fix  their  attention  upon  a  great 
natural  deliverance  to  be  accomplished  for  them  in 
the  fulness  of  time  by  the  infinite  Divine  mercy. 
Thus  in  the  sacred  or  symbolic  Hebrew  Scriptures, 
the  law  is  always  prefaced  by  the  assertion  of  a  great 
figurative  redemption  Divinely  wrought.  "  And  God 
spake  all  these  words,  saying :  /,  the  Lord  thg  God, 
have  brought  thee  out  of  the  land  of  Egypt,  out  of  the 
house  of  bondage!'  This  is  the  law's  supreme  sanc- 
tion, and  its  invariable  challenge  to  the  imagination 
of  its  votary,  that  the  spiritual  Creator  of  men  —  He 
who  is  their  true  but  unseen  being  —  is  their  nat- 
ural Redeemer  as  well,  giving  them  deliverance  first 
from  the  infirmities  and  corruptions  incident  to  their 
finite  generation,  as  the  indispensable  condition  of 
their  truly  fulfilling  it.  Then  in  strict  accordance 
with  this  majestic  proem,  the  letter  of  the  law  goes 
on  to  indicate  to  its  intelligent  subject,  first,  those 
dispositions  of  heart  and  mind  which  befit  this  great 
deliverance :   namely,  a  sentiment  of  tender  awe  and 


38        ITS  FORCE  PUEELY  REGENERATIVE. 

reverence  for  his  adorable  Divine  Redeemer,  of 
deference  to  his  natural  elders  and  superiors,  and 
of  brotherhood  or  impartial  fellowship  to  his  natu- 
ral equals  :  and,  secondly,  sums  up  and  stigmatizes 
to  his  eternal  abhorrence  the  four  or  five  generic 
forms  of  evil  action  which  alone  perpetuate  the  sway 
of  his  old  nature,  and  therefore  vitiate  his  experience 
of  the  regenerate  life.  And  now  mark  what  the 
comment  of  the  New  Testament  upon  this  Old  Tes- 
tament legal  Divine  administration  is,  namely :  that 
every  subject  of  the  law — who  so  far  failed  to  sym- 
pathize with  its  spiritual  scope  as  a  discipline  of  the 
heart  in  man  in  including  all  men  without  excep- 
tion under  sin,  as  nevertheless  to  make  a  boast  of  its 
letter  in  giving  some  men  a  conscience  of  righteous- 
ness—  was  Divinely  rejected. 

Of  course  we  no  longer  live  under  a  literal  admin- 
istration of  Divine  things,  but  an  overtly  spiritual 
one.  But  our  ecclesiastical  leaders  are  apparently 
blind  to  this  patent  fact,  being  determined  to  eter- 
nize this  inveterate  Jewish  itch  after  a  carnal  right- 
eousness, such  as  may  distinguish  Christians  out- 
wardly no  less  than  inwardly  from  other  men.  The 
skulking  and  beggarly  way  they  take  to  gratify  this 
evil  concupiscence,  is  by  reorganizing  the  law  — 
considered  as  the  unchanged  and  indefeasible  ground 
of  man's  justification  —  under  the  specious  mask  of 


PERSISTENT  JUDAISM   OF   THE   CHURCH.  39 

a  Christian  "  profession,"  or  the  duty  which  believers 
owe  their  faith  "to  profess  Christ"  before  the  world, 
and  so  mortify  the  secular  spirit  within  them.  And 
we  may  frankly  appeal  accordingly  to  any  of  the 
more  flagrant  types  of  the  Christian  "profession" 
among  us,  to  confirm  and  illustrate  the  New  Testa- 
ment affirmation  of  the  profound  spfritual  death  and 
damnation  that  inhere  in  every  attempt  to  compass 
a  literal  or  personal  holiness  at  the  Divine  hands. 

I  will  not  cite  the  frequent  testimony  of  our 
newspapers  to  show  how  common  an  instinct  of 
the  public  mind  it  is  to  feel,  that  a  man's  practical 
morality  invites  close  scrutiny  the  moment  he  be- 
comes any  way  conspicuous  as  claiming  a  profes- 
sional sanctity.  And  it  is  in  fact  growing  a  ludi- 
crous spectacle,  to  see  how  an  almost  fatal  Divine 
7iemesis  pursues  those  who  abound  in  the  ways  of 
the  current  self-righteousness,  or  achieve  a  place  of 
honor  in  the  ranks  of  technical  piety,  until  they  turn 
out  very  often  an  actual  stench  in  men's  nostrils  for 
their  grossly  immoral  practices.  But  I  prefer  to 
shut  my  eyes  to  these  catastrophes  in  the  moral  or 
subjective  sphere,  in  order  to  look  behind  them  at 
what  may  be  regarded  as  their  root.  The  moral 
experience  of  man  has  been  hitherto  completely  sub- 
servient to  the  needs  of  his  spiritual  freedom,  or  his 
growth   in   humility   and    tender   reverence   for   the 


40  "PROFESSIONAL"  EELIGION 

Divine  name;  and  now  that  this  freedom  is  inflow- 
ing into  the  hmnan  mind  in  unexampled  measure, 
it  is  not  to  be  wondered  at  that  those  who  are 
insensible  and  indifferent  to  the  Divine  substance 
should  be  equally  insensible  and  indifferent  to  the 
genuine  morality  which  has  been  its  human  type. 
But,  bad  as  these  moral  obliquities  are,  I  am  per- 
suaded that  the  interests  of  spiritual  religion  are  far 
more  deeply  compromised  in  the  Avorld  by  those  of  its 
"professors"  who  are  not  practically  immoral,  but  con- 
trive on  the  contrary  to  enjoy  the  esteem  of  their 
friends  while  they  live,  and  to  die  —  when  they  die 
—  in  the  odor  of  a  corrupt  conventional  sanctity. 

The  only  danger  to  the  spirit  of  religion  (and  this 
is  a  danger  that  besets  every  inward  grace  of  man- 
hood) comes  from  the  effort  of  the  soul  to  assume  and 
cherish  a  devout  5^^-consciousness  ;  or  so  to  abound  in 
a  religious  sense,  as  to  incur  the  imputation  of  religi- 
osity or  superstition.  This  is  the  inalienable  vice  of 
professional  religion,  the  only  sincere  fruit  it  is  capa- 
ble of  bringing  forth.  The  evil  spirit  which  rehgion 
is  primarily  intended  to  exorcise  in  us  is  the  spirit 
of  selfhood,  based  upon  a  most  inadequate  apprehen- 
sion of  its  strictly  provisional  uses  to  our  spiritual 
nurture.  The  gradual  conquest  or  slaying  of  this 
unholy  spirit  of  self  in  man  is  the  sole  function 
Mhich  religion  proposes  to  itself  during  his  natural 


THE  TRUE  ANTICHRIST.  41 

life;  and  without  taxing  our  co-operation  too  se- 
verely, it  yet  gives  us  enough  to  do  before  its  benig- 
nant mission  is  fully  wrought  out.  Such  being 
the  invariable  office  of  the  religious  instinct,  profes- 
sional religion  steps  in  to  simulate  its  sway,  and  with 
an  air  all  the  while  of  even  canting  deference,  pro- 
ceeds to  build  again  the  things  which  were  destroyed, 
by  reorganizing  man's  selfhood  on  a  more  specious 
or  consecrated  basis,  and  so  authenticating  all  its 
unslain  lusts  in  a  way  of  devotion  to  the  conventicle, 
at  least,  if  not  to  the  open,  undisguised  world. 
•■  Professional  religion  thus  stamps  itself  the  devil's 
subtlest  device  for  keeping  the  human  soul  in  bond- 
age. Religion  says  death  —  inward  or  spiritual 
death  —  to  the  selfhood  in  man.  Professional  relig- 
ion says:  "Nay,  not  death,  above  all  not  inward  or 
spiritual  — because  this  would  be  living — death,  and 
obviously  the  selfhood  must  live  in  order  to  be  vivi- 
fied of  God.  By  no  means  therefore  let  us  say  an 
inward  or  living  death  to  selfhood,  but  an  outward 
or  quasi  death,  professionalhj  or  ritually  enacted,  and 
so  operating  a  change  of  base  for  the  selfhood.  Self- 
hood doubtless  has  been  hitherto  based  upon  a  most 
unrighteous  enmity  on  the  part  of  the  world  to  God, 
and  has  of  itself  shared  the  enmity.  Let  man  then 
only  acknowledge,  professionally  or  ritually,  this 
wicked  enmity  of    the  world    to  God,  and   he  may 


42  RITUALISM,   REVIVALISM,    RADICALISM. 

keep  his  selfhood  unimpaired  and  unchallenged,  to 
expand  and  flourish  in  secula  seculorum." 

Professional  religion,  I  repeat,  is  the  devil's  mas- 
terpiece for  ensnaring  silly,  selfish  men.  The  ugly 
heast  has  two  heads :  one  called  Ritualism,  intended 
to  devour  a  finer  and  fastidious  style  of  men,  men  of 
sentiment  and  decorum,  cherishing  scrupulously  mod- 
erate views  of  the  difference  between  man  and  God ; 
the  other  called  Revivalism,  with  a  great  red  mouth 
intended  to  gobble  up  a  coarser  sort  of  men,  men 
for  the  most  part  of  a  fierce  carnality,  of  ungovern- 
able appetite  and  passion,  susceptible  at  best  only 
of  the  most  selfish  hopes,  and  the  most  selfish  fears, 
towards  God.  I  must  sa}'-,  we  are  not  greatly  dev- 
astated here  in  Boston  —  though  occasionally  vexed 
—  by  either  head  of  the  beast ;  on  the  contrary,  it 
is  amusing  enough  to  observe  how  afraid  the  great 
beast  himself  is  of  being  pecked  to  pieces  on  our 
streets  by  a  little  indigenous  bantam-cock  which  calls 
itself  Radicalism,  and  which  struts,  and  crows,  and 
scratches  gravel  in  a  manner  so  bumptious  and  per- 
emptory, that  I  defy  any  ordinary  barnyard  chanti- 
cleer to  imitate  it. 

But  I  am  forgetting  to  answer  your  doubt  in 
relation  to  the  Christian  truth,  which  is  the  wholly 
spiritual  truth  of  God's  natural  humanity. 


LETTER    V. 


DEAR  FRIEND:  — I  will  introduce 
what  I  have  to  say  to  you  in  regard  to 
■|fe!^y|^'  the  genesis  of  my  religious  faith,  by  re- 
citing a  fact  of  experience,  interesting  in 
itself  no  doubt  in  a  psychological  point  of  view,  but 
particularly  interesting  to  my  imagination  as  mark- 
ing the  interval  between  my  merely  rationalistic  in- 
terest in  Divine  things,  and  the  subsequent  struggle 
of  my  heart  after  a  more  intimate  and  living  knowl- 
edge of  them. 

In  the  spring  of  1841  I  was  living  with  my  family 
in  the  neighborhood  of  Windsor,  England,  much 
absorbed  in  the  study  of  the  Scriptures.  Two  or 
three  years  before  this  period  I  had  made  an  im- 
portant discovery,  as  I  fancied,  namely :  that  the 
book  of  Genesis  was  not  intended  to  throw  a  direct 
light  upon  our  natural  or  race  history,  but  was  an 
altogether  mystical  or  symbolic  record  of  the  laws 
of  God's  spiritual  creation  and  providence.     I  wrote 


44  SUDDEN  DEMORALIZATION 

a  course  of  lectures  in  exposition  of  tins  idea,  and 
delivered  tliem  to  good  audiences  in  New  York. 
The  preparation  of  these  lectures,  while  it  did  much 
to  confirm  me  in  the  impression  that  I  had  made 
an  interesting  discovery,  and  one  which  would  ex- 
tensively modify  theology,  convinced  me,  however, 
that  a  much  more  close  and  studious  application 
of  my  idea  than  I  had  yet  given  to  the  illustration 
of  the  details'  of  the  sacred  letter  was  imperatively 
needed.  During  my  residence  abroad,  accordingly, 
I  never  tired  in  my  devotion  to  this  aim,  and  my 
success  seemed  so  flattering  at  length  that  I  hoped 
to  be  finally  qualified  to  contribute  a  not  insignificant 
mite  to  the  sum  of  man's  highest  knowledge.  I 
remember  I  felt  especially  hopeful  in  the  prosecution 
of  my  task  all  the  time  I  was  at  "Windsor;  my 
health  was  good,  my  spirits  cheerful,  and  the  pleas- 
ant scenery  of  the  Great  Park  and  its  neighbor- 
hood furnished  us  a  constant  temptation  to  long 
walks  and  drives. 

One  day,  however,  towards  the  close  of  May,  hav- 
ing eaten  a  comfortable  dinner,  I  remained  sitting 
at  the  table  after  the  family  had  dispersed,  idly 
gazing  at  the  embers  in  the  grate,  thinking  of  noth- 
ings and  feehng  only  the  exhilaration  incident  to 
a  good  digestion,  when  suddenly  —  in  a  lightning- 
flash  as  it  were  —  "  fear  came  upon  me,  and  trem- 


OF   THE   WRITER.  45 


bliiig,  which  made  all  my  bones  to  shake."  To  all 
appearance  it  was  a  perfectly  insane  and  abject  terror, 
without  ostensible  cause,  and  only  to  be  accounted 
for,  to  my  perplexed  imagination,  by  some  damned 
shape  squatting  invisible  to  me  within  the  precincts 
of  the  room,  and  raying  out  from  his  fetid  personality 
influences  fatal  to  life.  The  thing  had  not  lasted  ten 
seconds  before  I  felt  myself  a  wreck,  that  is,  re- 
duced from  a  state  of  firm,  vigorous,  joyful  man- 
hood to  one  of  almost  helpless  infancy.  The  only 
self-control  I  was  capable  of  exerting  was  to  keep 
my  seat.  I  felt  the  greatest  desire  to  run  inconti- 
nently to  the  foot  of  the  stairs  and  shout  for  help 
to  my  wife,  —  to  run  to  the  roadside  even,  and  ap- 
peal to  the  public  to  protect  me;  but  by  an  im- 
mense effort  I  controlled  these  frenzied  impulses, 
and  determined  not  to  budge  from  my  chair  till  I 
had  recovered  my  lost  self-possession.  This  pur- 
pose I  held  to  for  a  good  long  hour,  as  I  reckoned 
time,  beat  upon  meanwhile  by  an  ever-growing 
tempest  of  doubt,  anxiety,  and  despair,  with  abso- 
lutely no  relief  from  any  truth  I  had  ever  encoun- 
tered save  a  most  pale  and  distant  glimmer  of  the 
Divine  existence,  —  when  I  resolved  to  abandon  the 
vain  struggle,  and  communicate  without  more  ado 
what  seemed  my  sudden  burden  of  inmost,  impla- 
cable unrest  to  my  wife. 


46  ALMOST  COMPLETE  MORAL  IMBECILITY. 

Now,  to  make  a  long  story  short,  this  ghastly  con- 
dition of  mind  continued  with  me,  with  gradually 
lengthening  intervals  of  relief,  for  two  years,  and  even 
longer.  I  consulted  eminent  physicians,  who  told 
me  that  I  had  doubtless  overworked  my  brain,  an 
evil  for  which  no  remedy  existed  in  medicine,  but 
only  in  time,  and  patience,  and  growth  into  improved 
physical  conditions.  They  all  recommended  by  way 
of  hygiene  a  resort  to  the  water-cure  treatment,  a 
life  in  the  open  air,  cheerful  company,  and  so  forth, 
and  thus  quietly  and  skilfully  dismissed  me  to  my 
own  spiritual  medication.  At  first,  when  I  began 
to  feel  a  half-hour's  respite  from  acute  mental  an- 
guish, the  bottomless  mystery  of  my  disease  com- 
pletely fascinated  me.  The  more,  however,  I  wor- 
ried myself  with  speculations  about  the  cause  of  it, 
the  more  the  mystery  deepened,  and  the  deeper 
also  grew  my  instinct  of  resentment  at  what  seemed 
so  needless  an  interference  with  my  personal  lib- 
erty. I  went  to  a  famous  water-cure,  which  did 
nothing  towards  curing  my  malady  but  enricli 
my  memory  with  a  few  morbid  specimens  of  Eng- 
lish insularity  and  prejudice,  but  it  did  much  to 
alleviate  it  by  familiarizing  my  senses  with  the  ex- 
quisite and  endless  charm  of  English  landscape,  and 
giving  me  my  first  full  rational  relish  of  what  may 
be  called  England's   pastoral  beauty.      To  be  sure 


CHARM  OF  ENGLISH  LANDSCAPE.         47 

I  had  spent  a  few  days  in  Devonshire  when  I  was 
young,  but  my  delight  then  was  simple  enthusi- 
asm, was  helpless  aesthetic  intoxication  in  fact.  The 
"  cure "  was  situated  in  a  much  less  lovely  but  still 
beautiful  country,  on  the  borders  of  a  famous  park, 
to  both  of  which,  moreover,  it  gave  you  unlimited 
right  of  possession  and  enjoyment.  At  least  this 
was  the  way  it  always  struck  my  imagination.  The 
thoroughly  disinterested  way  the  English  have  of 
looking  at  their  own  hills  and  vales,  —  the  indiffer- 
ent, contemptuous,  and  as  it  were  disowniiig  mood 
they  habitually  put  on  towards  the  most  ravishing 
pastoral  loveliness  man's  sun  anywhere  shines  upon, 
—  gave  me  always  the  sense  of  being  a  discoverer 
of  these  things,  and  of  a  consequent  right  to  enter 
upon  their  undisputed  possession.  At  all  events 
the  rich  light  and  shade  of  English  landscape,  the 
gorgeous  cloud-pictures  that  forever  dimple  and  di- 
versify her  fragrant  and  palpitating  bosom,  have 
awakened  a  tenderer  chord  in  me  than  I  have  ever 
felt  at  home  almost ;  and  time  and  again  while  living 
at  this  dismal  water-cure,  and  listening  to  its  end- 
less "strife  of  tongues"  about  diet,  and  regimen, 
and  disease,  and  politics,  and  parties,  and  persons, 
I  have  said  to  myself:  The  curse  of  manldnd,  that 
which  keeps  our  manhood  so  Utile  and  so  depraved, 
is  its  sense  of  selfhood,    and  the  absurd   abominable 


48  GROWING  DELIGHT  IN  NATURE, 


oj)inionativeness  it  engenders.  How  sweet  it  would  be 
to  find  oneself  no  longer  man,  but  one  of  those  inno- 
cent and  ignorant  sheep  pasturing  upon  that  placid 
hillside,  and  drinking  in  eternal  deio  and  freshness 
from   nature's  lavish   bosom ! 

But  let  me  hasten  to  the  proper  upshot  of  this 
incident.  My  stay  at  the  water-cure,  unpromising 
as  it  was  in  point  of  physical  results,  made  me  con- 
scious erelong  of  a  most  important  change  operating 
in  the  sphere  of  my  will  and  understanding.  It 
struck  me  as  very  odd,  soon  after  my  breakdown,  that 
I  should  feel  no  longing  to  resume  the  work  which 
had  been  interrupted  by  it ;  and  from  that  day  to 
this  —  nearly  thirty-five  years  —  I  have  never  once 
cast  a  retrospective  glance,  even  of  curiosity,  at  the 
immense  piles  of  manuscript  which  had  erewhile 
so  absorbed  me.  I  suppose  if  any  one  had  desig- 
nated me  previous  to  that  event  as  an  earnest  seeker 
after  truth,  I  should  myself  have  seen  nothing  un- 
becoming in  the  appellation.  But  now  —  within 
two  or  three  months  of  my  catastrophe  —  I  felt  sure 
I  had  never  caught  a  glimpse  of  truth.  My  present 
consciousness  was  exactly  that  of  an  utter  and  plenary 
destitution  of  truth.  Indeed  an  ugly  suspicion  had 
more  than  once  forced  itself  upon  me,  that  I  had 
never  really  wished  the  truth,  but  only  to  ventilate 
my  own  ability  in  discovering  it.     I  was  getting  sick 


AND  DISGUST  WITH  ONESELF.  49 


to  death  in  fact  with  a  sense  of  my  downright  intel- 
lectual poverty  and  dishonesty.  My  studious  mental 
activity  had  served  manifestly  to  base  a  mere  "  castle 
in  the  air,"  and  the  castle  had  vanished  in  a  brief 
bitter  moment  of  time,  leaving  not  a  wrack  behind. 
I  never  felt  again  the  most  passing  impulse,  even,  to 
look  where  it  stood,  having  done  with  it  forever. 
Truth  indeed!  How  should  a  beggar  like  me  be 
expected  to  discover  it?  How  should  any  man  of 
woman  born  pretend  to  such  ability?  Truth  must 
reveal  itself  if  it  would  be  known,  and  even  then 
how  imperfectly  known  at  best !  For  truth  is  God, 
the  omniscient  and  omnipotent  God,  and  who  shall 
pretend  to  comprehend  that  great  and  adorable  per- 
fection ?  And  yet  who  that  aspires  to  the  name  of 
man,  would  not  cheerfully  barter  all  he  knows  of  life 
for  a  bare  glimpse  of  the  hem  of  its  garment  ? 

I  was  calling  one  day  upon  a  friend  (since  de- 
ceased) who  lived  in  the  vicinity  of  the  water-cure  — 
a  lady  of  rare  qualities  of  heart  and  mind,  and  of 
singular  personal  loveliness  as  well  —  who  desired 
to  know  what  had  brought  me  to  the  water-cure. 
After  I  had  done  telling  her  in  substance  what  I 
have  told  you,  she  rephed :  "  It  is,  then,  very  much 
as  I  had  ventured  from  two  or  three  previous  things 
you  have  said,  to  suspect :  you  are  undergoing  what 
Swedenborg  calls  a  vastaUonj  and  though,  natiu-ally 


50  A  FRIEND'S  ACCOUNT  OF  SWEDENBORG. 

enough,  you  yourself  are  despondent  or  even  despair- 
ing about  the  issue,  I  cannot  help  taking  an  altogether 
hopeful  view  of  your  prospects."  In  expressing  my 
thanks  for  her  encouraging  words,  I  remarked  that  I 
was  not  at  all  familiar  with  the  Swedenborgian  tech- 
nics, and  that  I  should  be  extremely  happy  if  she 
would  follow  up  her  flattering  judgment  of  my  con- 
dition by  turning  into  plain  English  the  contents  of 
the  very  handsome  Latin  word  she  had  used.  To 
this  she  again  modestly  replied  that  she  only  read 
Swedenborg  as  an  amateur,  and  was  ill-qualified  to 
expound  his  philosophy,  but  there  could  be  no  doubt 
about  its  fundamental  postulate,  which  was,  that  a  new 
birth  for  man,  both  in  the  individual  and  the  uni- 
versal realm,  is  the  secret  of  the  Divine  creation  and 
providence :  that  the  other  world,  according  to  Swe- 
denborg, furnishes  the  true  sphere  of  man's  spiritual 
or  individual  being,  the  real  and  immortal  being  he 
has  in  God ;  and  he  represents  this  world,  conse- 
quently, as  furnishing  only  a  preliminary  theatre  of 
his  natural  formation  or  existence  in  subordination 
thereto ;  so  making  the  question  of  human  regenera- 
tion, both  in  grand  and  in  little,  the  capital  problem 
of  philosophy :  that,  without  pretending  to  dog- 
matize, she  had  been  struck  with  the  philosophic 
interest  of  my  narrative  in  this  point  of  view,  and 
had  used  the  word   vastation  to  characterize  one  of 


I  AM  MUCH  INTERESTED.  51 

the  stages  of  the  regenerative  process,  as  she  had 
found  it  described  by  Swedenborg.  And  then, 
finally,  my  excellent  friend  went  on  to  outline  for 
me,  in  a  very  interesting  manner,  her  conception  of 
Swedenborg's  entire  doctrine  on  the  subject. 

Her  account  of  it,  as  I  found  on  a  subsequent 
study  of  Swedenborg,  was  neither  quite  as  exact  nor 
quite  as  comprehensive  as  the  facts  required ;  but  at 
all  events  I  was  glad  to  discover  that  any  human 
being  had  so  much  even  as  proposed  to  shed  the 
light  of  positive  knowledge  upon  the  soul's  history, 
or  bring  into  rational  relief  the  alternate  dark  and 
bright  —  or  infernal  aud  celestial  —  phases  of  its 
finite  constitution.  For  I  had  an  immediate  hope, 
amounting  to  an  almost  prophetic  instinct,  of  finding 
in  the  attempt,  however  rash,  some  diversion  to  my 
cares,  and  I  determined  instantly  to  run  up  to  Lon- 
don and  procure  a  couple  of  Swedenborg's  volumes, 
of  which,  if  I  should  not  be  allowed  on  sanitary 
grounds  absolutely  to  read  them,  I  might  at  any 
rate  turn  over  the  leaves,  and  so  catch  a  satisfying 
savor,  or  at  least  an  appetizing  flavor,  of  the  possible 
relief  they  might  in  some  better  day  afford  to  my 
poignant  need.  From  the  huge  mass  of  tomes  placed 
by  the  bookseller  on  the  counter  before  me,  I  selected 
two  of  the  least  in  bulk  —  the  treatise  on  the  Divine 
Love  and  Wisdom,  ♦'^nd  that  on  the  Divine  Providence. 


52  I   RESOLVE   TO   READ   HIM. 

I  gave  them,  after  I  brought  them  home,  many  a 
random  but  eager  glance,  but  at  last  my  interest  in 
them  grew  so  frantic  under  this  tantahzing  process 
of  reading  that  I  resolved,  in  spite  of  the  doctors, 
that,  instead  of  standing  any  longer  shivering  on  the 
brink,  I  would  boldly  plunge  into  the  stream,  and 
ascertain,  once  for  all,  to  what  undiscovered  sea  its 
waters  might  bear  me. 


I^S^!S^ 

m^m^ms. 

^r 

K«Ji3*^J3?w^3*S^^J^to»5^    f^ 

^^^^ 

f^^ 

f|W--j^*|Jl^S^^- 

m 

LETTER   VI. 


'Y  DEAR  FRIEND:  — I  read  from  the 
first  with  palpitating  interest.  Mj  heart 
divined,  even  before  my  intelHgence  was 
prepared  to  do  justice  to  the  books,  the 
unequalled  amount  of  truth  to  be  found  in  them. 
Imagine  a  fever  patient,  sufficiently  restored  of  his 
malady  to  be  able  to  think  of  something  beside  him- 
self, suddenly  transported  where  the  free  airs  of 
heaven  blow  upon  him,  and  the  sound  of  running 
waters  refreshes  his  jaded  senses,  and  you  have  a 
feeble  image  of  my  delight  in  reading.  Or,  better 
still,  imagine  a  subject  of  some  petty  despotism  con- 
demned to  die,  and  with  —  what  is  more  and  worse 
—  a  sentiment  of  death  pervading  all  his  conscious- 
ness, lifted  by  a  sudden  miracle  into  felt  harmony 
with  universal  man,  and  filled  to  the  brim  with  the 
sentiment  of  indestructible  life  instead,  and  you  Avill 
have  a  true  picture  of  my  emancipated  condition. 
For  while  these  remarkable  books   familiarized   me 


5i  A  FEW  EXPLANATORY   WORDS 

with  the  angelic  conception  of  the  Divine  being  and 
providence,  they  gave  me  at  the  same  time  the 
amplest  rationale  I  could  have  desired  of  my  own 
particular  suifering,  as  inherent  in  the  profound  un- 
conscious death  I  bore  about  in  xny  proprium  or  self- 
hood. 

—  Here  let  me  interpose  a  few  words  of  caution. 
I  have  not  the  least  ambition  to  set  myself  up  as 
Swedenborg's  personal  attorney  or  solicitor.  Swe- 
denborg  himself  is  not  the  least  a  fascinating  per- 
sonality to  my  regard,  and  if  I  were  able  by  skilful 
palaver  to  reason  you  out  of  an  unfavorable  into 
a  favorable  estimate  of  his  personal  genius  and 
worth,  I  should  prefer  not  to  do  it ; /because  just  in 
proportion  as  you  concede  any  personal  authority 
to  a  writer  you  are  unlikely  to  be  spiritually  helped 
by  him.  I  You  are  sure,  in  fiict,  to  be  spiritually 
enfeebled  by  him.  Besides,  I  am  persuaded  that, 
notwithstanding  Swedenborg's  personal  limitations  as 
measured  by  the  taste  of  our  day,  his  amazing  books 
will  suffer  by  no  man's  neglect,  were  he  the  most 
considerable  man  of  his  time  in  religion,  in  science, 
and  in  philosophy.  And  I  should  think  myself  very 
ill  employed,  therefore,  in  drumming  up  a  regiment 
of  raw  recruits  to  dim  their  patient  lustre,  or  degrade 
it  to  the  glitter  of  the  gutters.  His  books  invite  the 
most   opposite   appreciation,    for   they   have   all   the 


ABOUT  SWEDENBORG.  55 

breadth  and  variety  of  nature  in  their  aspect  —  now 
smihng  with  celestial  peace,  now  grim  with  infernal 
storm  and  wrath.  But  they  have  always  a  light 
above  nature,  that  is  to  say,  not  only  above  this  realm 
of  mixed  good  and  evil  which  we  call  the  natural 
world,  but  also  above  that  realm  of  divided  good  and 
evil  to  which  we  give  the  name  of  the  spiritual  world  ; 
and  in  this  Divine  light  we  may  discern,  if  we  are 
attentive,  an  objective  reconciliation  of  infinite  and 
finite,  which  shall  finally  blot  all  memory,  either  of 
a  mixed  or  a  divided  good  and  evil,  forever  out  of 
mind. 

At  the  moment  I  am  speaking  of — the  moment 
of  my  first  encounter  with  Swedenborg's  writings  — 
my  intellect  had  been  so  completely  vastated  of  every 
semblance  of  truth  inherited  from  the  past,  and  my 
soul  consequently  was  in  a  state  of  such  sheer  and 
abject  famine  with  respect  to  Divine  things,  that  I 
doubt  not  I  should  have  welcomed  "the  father  of 
lies  "  to  my  embrace,  nor  ever  have  cared  to  scruti- 
nize his  credentials,  had  he  presented  himself  bear- 
ing the  priceless  testimony  which  these  books  bear 
to  the  loveliness  and  grandeur  of  the  Divine  name. 
Nor  should  I  counsel  any  one,  who  is  not  similarly 
dilapidated  in  his  intellectual  foundations  —  any  one 
who  is  still  at  rest  in  his  hereditary  bed  of  doctrine, 
orthodox  or  heterodox  —  to  pay  the  least  attention 


56  A   FEW   EXPLANATORY   WORDS 

to  them.  For  on  the  surface  they  repel  delight. 
They  would  seem  to  have  been  mercifully  constructed 
on  the  plan  of  barring  out  idle  acquaintance,  and 
disgusting  a  voluptuous  literary  curiosity.  But  to 
the  aching  heart  and  the  void  mind  —  the  heart  and 
mind  which,  being  sensibly  famished  upon  those 
gross  husks  of  religious  doctrine  whether  Orthodox 
or  Unitarian,  upon  which  nevertheless  our  veriest 
swine  are  contentedly  fed,  are  secretly  pining  for 
their  Father's  house  where  there  is  bread  enough 
and  to  spare  —  they  will  be  sure,  I  think,  to  bring 
infinite  balm  and  contentment.  I  am  confident  that 
no  such  readers  will  ever  care  to  discuss  any  ques- 
tion which  is  properly  personal  to  Swedenborg. 

I  disdain  to  argue,  then,  with  you  or  anybody 
else,  in  regard  to  Swedenborg,  on  general  or  a  priori 
principles.  Think  what  you  will,  and  say  what  you 
will,  of  his  dogmatic  pretensions  —  make  him  out 
if  it  please  you,  in  the  abundance  of  your  self-satis- 
faction, either  a  knave  or  a  fool  or  both  —  the  judg- 
ment it  is  true  may  give  out  a  strong  subjective 
flavor,  but  I  have  something  better  to  do  than  to 
argue  it  on  its  objective  merits.  Besides,  I  take  it 
that  no  man  is  eager  to  argue  a  question  about  which 
he  himself  has  not  at  least  some  secret  misgiving. 
And  I  have  no  more  misgiving,  either  secret  or  open, 
in  regard  to  Swedenborg's  teaching,  than  the  new- 


ABOUT  SWEDENBORG.  57 

born  babe  has  in  regard  to  its  mother's  milk.  He 
has  moreover  so  effectually  vulgarized  to  ray  mind 
the  inmost  significance  of  heaven  and  hell  by  expos- 
ing their  purely  provisional  character  and  contents, 
that  I  should  feel  myself  wanting  both  in  proper 
self-respect  and  proper  homage  to  the  Divine  name, 
if  I  continued  to  cherish  anything  but  a  strictly 
scientific  curiosity  with  regard  to  angel  or  devil; 
or  viewed  it  as  the  consummation  of  my  being  to 
be  eternally  associated  with  the  one  and  eternally 
separated  from  the  other. 

In  thus  avowing  my  free  conviction  of  the  im- 
mortal services  Swedenborg  has  rendered  to  the 
mind,  I  confess  I  should  be  greatly  mortified  if  you 
looked  upon  this  avowal  as  a  "  profession  of  faith  "  in 
him,  or  as  an  ascription  on  my  part  of  any  more 
dogmatic  authority  to  him  than  I  should  ascribe 
in  their  various  measure  to  Socrates  or  John  Mill. 
He  reports  himself  as  interviewing,  by  special  Divine 
appointment,  spirits  and  angels  and  devils  in  re- 
spect to  what  they  could  attest  each  in  their  degree, 
whether  consciously  or  unconsciously,  of  the  prin- 
ciples of  the  world's  administration.  Thus  he  is 
at  best  a  mere  informer  or  reporter,  though  an 
egregiously  intelligent  one,  in  the  interest  of  a  new 
evolution  of  the  human  mind,  speculative  and  praci- 
tical;  and  his  testimony,   therefore,   to  the  spiritual 


58  A  FEW  EXPLANATORY  WORDS 

truth  of  the  case,  however  much  it  may  attract  your 
confidence  both  in  respect  to  its  general  competence 
and  its  palpable  veracity,  is  not  for  an  instant  to  be 
regarded  as  a  revelation,  or  confounded  with  living 
Divine  truth.  The  sphere  of  Revelation  is  the 
sphere,  of  life  exclusively,  and  its  truth  is  addressed 
not  to  the  reflective  understanding  of  men,  but  to 
their  living  perception.  ;  Truth,  to  every  soul  that 
has  ever  felt  its  inward  breathing,  disowns  all  out- 
ward authority,^ — disowns,  if  need  be,  all  outward 
prohahility  or  attestation  of  Fact.  The  only  witness 
it  craves,  and  this  witness  it  depends  upon,  is  that 
of  good  in  the  heart ;  and  it  allows  no  lower  or  less 
decisive  attestation.  Swedenborg,  at  all  events,  is 
incapable  of  the  effrontery  thus  imputed  to  him. 
Nothing  could  have  awakened  a  blush  of  deeper 
resentment  on  his  innocent  brow,  if  he  could  have 
foreseen  the  outrage,  than  the  base  spirit  of  sect, 
which  in  the  face  of  his  honest  denunciations  of  it 
ventures  to  renew  its  unhallowed  empire  by  clothing 
him  with  Divine  authority. 

The  pretension  to  authority  in  intellectual  things 
belongs  exclusively  to  the  Romish  Church;  and  it 
has  of  late  grown  so  reckless  and  wanton  even  in 
that  hysterical  suburb,  as  to  show  that  it  has  no 
longer  any  faith  in  itself,  but  is  clung  to  only  as 
a  desperate  commercial  speculation.     If,  accordingly. 


ABOUT  SWEDENBORG.  59 

any  taint  of  this  spiritual  dry-rot  attached  to  these 
transparent  books,  I  should  advise  you  to  send  author 
and  books,  both  alike,  into  the  land  of  forgetfulness. 
It  is  not  conceivable  that  the  Divine  providence 
should  deliberately  endow  a  quack  to  further  his 
wise  designs  towards  the  intellect  of  the  race.  And 
every  man  in  this  day  of  restored  spiritual  liberty, 
and  with  the  doomed  papacy  before  him,  who  yet 
apes  its  blasphemy,  so  far  as  to  claim  either  for 
himself  or  another  a  delegated  Divine  authority  over 
the  reason  and  conscience  of  men,  must  be  a  double- 
distilled  quack  ;  that  is,  knave  and  fool  both ;  though 
he  may  not  have  perspicacity  enough  to  suspect  him- 
self of  either  obliquity.  Indeed,  none  but  a  truly 
wise  man  ever  suspects  himself  of  being  a  fool,  and 
none  but  a  truly  good  man  has  courage  to  avow  him- 
self a  knave;  so  that  if  the  world  could  once  get 
fairly  defecated  of  its  unconscious  knaves  and  fools, 
we  should  have  only  good  men  and  wise  left  behind. 
At  all  events,  Swedenborg  is  conspicuously  free 
of  this  vulgarity.  His  own  faith  is  vowed  unaf- 
fectedly and  exclusively  to  the  one  sole  and  consum- 
mate revelation  of  the  Divine  name,  made  in  the 
gospel  of  Jesus  Christ;  and  he  is  not  such  a  silly 
and  vicious  he-goat,  accordingly,  as  to  go  about 
peddling  a  rival  revelation.  His  sole  intellectual 
pretension  is  to  emphasize  the  eternal  lustre  of  the 


GO  A  FEW   EXPLANATORY  WORDS 

gospel  to  men's  regard,  by  disclosing  its  interior  or 
spiritual  and  philosophic  contents,  as  they  became 
known  to  him  through  the  opening  of  his  spiritual 
senses.  Take  particular  notice,  therefore :  what  any 
honest  mind  goes  to  these  sincere  books  for  is,  not 
to  find,  any  Divine  warrant  there  either  for  his  faith 
or  his  practice,  for  every  man's  own  heart  alone  is 
competent  to  that  question ;  much  less  to  discover 
in  them  any  new  deodorizing  substance  which  will 
disguise  the  stale  fetor  of  ecclesiasticism  or  sacerdo- 
talism, and  so  commend  it  anew  to  men's  revolted 
nostrils  ;  but  all  simply  to  find  light  upon  the  philos- 
ophy of  the  gospel,  or  ascertain  what  its  internal  or 
universal  and  impersonal  contents  are,  of  the  truth  of 
which  contents  he  himself  is  all  the  while  his  own 
sole  and  divinely  empowered  arbiter. 

And  here  a  proper  caution  must  be  used,  lest  one 
run  headlong  into  an  exaggerated  or  superstitious 
estimate  of  Swedenborg's  books,  even  from  their 
own  point  of  view.  For  it  is  past  all  dispute  that 
Swedenborg  himself  had  at  best  only  a  most  general 
and  obscure  notion  of  the  benefit  which  was  to  accrue 
to  the  mind  of  man,  on  earth  and  in  heaven,  from 
the  last  Judgment  whose  operation  in  the  world  of 
spirits  he  so  minutely  describes.  The  immediate 
chaotic  or  revolutionary  effects  of  the  Judgment  ap- 
parently so  absorbed  his  attention  as  to  leave  him 


ABOUT  SWEDENBORG.  61 

neither  leisure  nor  inclination,  even  if  he  had  had 
the  power,  to  prognosticate  its  redeeming  virtue  upon 
the  progress  of  the  human  mind.  But  he  had  no 
such  prophetic  faculty,  even  in  reference  to  the  events 
he  was  daily  witnessing  in  the  world  of  spirits,  much 
less,  therefore,  in  reference  to  the  contingencies  of 
God's  order  in  this  lower  or  universal  world.  In- 
deed, he  tells  us  that  when  he  asked  the  angels  what 
iheir  judgment  was,  as  to  the  specific  effects  which 
would  follow  upon  earth  from  the  events  occurring 
in  the  world  of  spirits,  they  were  completely  unable 
to  satisfy  his  curiosity  in  that  behalf.  They  replied, 
in  effect,  that  tlicj/  knew  just  as  little  of  the  specific 
future  as  he  did — future  events  being  present  only 
to  the  Divine  mind  —  and  that  all  they  felt  sure 
of  in  general  was,  that  the  old  spiritual  tyranny 
under  which  the  human  mind  had  bsen  so  helplessly 
stifled,  being  now  at  last  effectually  dissipated  by 
the  breaking  up  of  the  ecclesiastical  heavens.  Popish 
and  Protestant  alike,  freethinking  in  religious  things 
would  be  henceforth  the  divinely  guaranteed  basis 
of  the  Church  on  earth.  And  if  freethinking  or 
scepticism  in  religious  things  —  the  things  of  the 
intellect  —  be  henceforth  the  normal  attitude  of  the 
natural  mind  as  a  consequence  of  the  last  Judgment, 
surely'  nothing  could  have  well  seemed  more  pre- 
posterous to  Swedenborg  than  to  think  of  ever  again 
elevating  the  discredited  banner  of  Authority.  ' 


62  A  FEW   EXPLANATORY  WORDS 

Conceive  of  Swedenborg  then,  personally,  as  you 
will,  and  welcome.  What  alone  I  care  about  is  not 
to  interest  your  intelligence  in  anything  that  is  per- 
sonal to  the  devout  and  estimable  old  seer,  but  in 
his  performances.  I  feel,  indeed,  a  perfect  indiffer- 
ence to  all  his  private  claims  upon  attention.  But 
my  gratitude  and  admiration  are  immense  for  what 
he  has  done  to  flood  the  human  mind  with  light 
out  of  inscrutable  darkness,  upon  the  question  of 
our  human  origin  and  destiny ;  upon  every  question, 
in  fact,  involved  in  a  true  cosmology,  or  permanent 
science  of  the  relations  which  exist  between  the  world 
of  thought  and  the  world  of  substance.  But  then, 
remember,  there  is  no  access  to  this  light  but  through 
honest  research,  guided  by  the  felt  needs  of  your 
intellect,  and  not  by  any  idle  literary  curiosity,  or 
mere  silly  ambition  to  know  Avhat  other  people  know, 
and  to  be  able  to  talk  about  what  they  talk  about. 
Above  all,  let  me  counsel  you  to  avoid,  as  you  would 
avoid  a  fog,  every  flippant  jackanapes  who  is  ecclesi- 
astically ordained  (or  unordained  by  the  holy  Ghost) 
to  minister  truth  to  you.  The  ecclesiastical  spirit, 
and  the  civic  spirit  bred  of  it,  are  now  the  only  evil 
spirits  upon  earth,  and  they  are  no  longer  compati- 
ble with  any  living  knowledge  of  truth.  Indeed,  no 
man  can  outwardly  communicate  truth  to  his  neigh- 
bor, miUch  less  any  whose  profession  it  is  to  do  so, 


ABOUT  SWEDENBORG.  63 

however  skilled  he  may  be  to  communicate  scientific 
information.  For  truth  is  living,  spiritual,  Divine, 
being  shaped  to  every  one's  intelligence  only  by  what 
he  has  of  celestial  love  in  his  heart.  Thus  Sweden- 
borg  will  doubtless  give  you  any  amount  of  inter- 
esting and  enlightening  information  about  the  spirit- 
ual world,  and  its  principles  of  administration.  And 
this  knowledge  taken  into  your  memory,  or  mental 
stomach,  will  constitute  so  much  nutritive  material 
to  be  intellectually  assimilated  by  you,  when  the 
living  truth  itself  has  begun  to  germinate  and  sprout 
in  your  heart.  But  as  to  actually  communicating 
the  truth  to  you  —  or  making  it  literally  over  to 
your  imderstanding  —  Swedenborg  is  of  course  just 
as  flatly  incompetent  to  that  function  as  every  other 
man  of  woman  born,  and  even  more  incapable  mor- 
ally, if  that  be  possible,  than  he  w^as  intellectually, 
of  making  any  such  blasphemous  claim. 


LETTER    VII. 


WY  DEAR  FRIEND:  — I  have  not  lost 
sight  of  my  subject,  as  you  doubtless  by 
this  time  suspect,  and  we  shall  soon  re- 
turn to  it.  But,  as  I  told  you  in  my  first 
letter,  my  nervous  force  is  very  much  abated  at  pres- 
ent, and  I  am  obliged  to  write  not  exactly  as  I  would, 
but  as  my  defective  energy  permits  me.  Besides, 
even  if  my  nerves  were  unimpaired,  it  would  be 
within  the  strict  logic  of  my  theme  to  hold  a  little 
discourse  with  you  about  Swedenborg  and  the  relation 
of  my  thought  to  his  books,  since  he  is  the  only  man, 
as  it  seems  to  me,  in  human  history  who  has  shed  any 
commanding  or  decisive  light  on  the  physiology  of 
the  soul.  That  is  to  say,  his  books  set  before  you,  as 
no  other  books  have  the  least  pretension  to  do,  certain 
FACTS  of  spiritual  oh^ervaiion  and  experience  which 
must,  if  you  read  them  with  interested  attention,  very 
soon  convince  you  that  you,  like  all  other  men,  have 
hitherto  utterly  misconceived  the  function  of  selfhood 


/ 


FURTHER  OBSERVATIONS.  65 

in  man,  and  hence  have  attributed  an  original  or  caus- 
ative influence,  instead  of  a  purely  ancillary  or  minis- 
terial one,  to  morality  in  human  affairs.  Observe 
what  I  say.  It  is  exclwswelij  these  facts  of  spiritual 
observation  and  experience,  recounted  by  Swedenborg, 
which  produce  the  effect  in  question,  and  not  the  least 
any  reasoning  of  his  own  in  regard  to  the  facts.  For 
this  is  what  Swedenborg  never  does,  namely,  reason 
about  the  things  he  professes  to  have  learned  from 
angels  and  spirits.  It  may  betoken  great  wisdom  or 
great  imbecility  in  him  to  your  mind  that  he  does 
not ;  but  such,  nevertheless,  is  the  fact.  He  never 
once,  so  far  as  I  have  observed,  has  attempted  to  throw 
a  persuasive  light  upon  the  things  he  professes  to 
have  heard  and  seen  among  his  angelic  acquaintance. 
Indeed,  his  own  intellectual  relation  to  the  facts  is 
left  altogether  undetermined  in  his  books.  There  can 
be  no  doubt  that  the  things  he  learned  diffused  an 
atmosphere  of  great  peace  and  sweetness  in  his  breast, 
and  this  makes  his  books  the  most  heavenly  reading  I 
know ;  but  there  is  no  sign  extant,  that  I  can  see,  of 
any  intellectual  quickening  being  produced  by  them, 
on  his  part,  in  regard  to  the  history  or  the  prospects 
of  the  race.  I  am  not  going  to  be  so  dull,  therefore^ 
as  to  promise  you  the  very  same  intellectual  results 
that  I  get  from  Swedenborg's  books,  even  if  you  your- 
self actually  have  recourse  to  them.     Indeed,  nmlti- 


66  FURTHER  OBSERVATIONS 

tudes  of  people  are  said  to  read  his  books  and  bring 
away  almost  no  intellectual  result,  —  multitudes  who 
resort  to  them  with  great  apparent  complacency,  and 
get,  no  doubt,  much  incidental  entertainment  and 
instruction  from  them,  and  yet  are  quite  blind  to 
their  proper  intellectual  significance,  to  the  extent,  I 
am  told,  many  of  them,  of  seeming  acutely  hostile  to 
it  when  it  is  brought  before  them.  All  this,  of  course, 
because  of  the  more  or  less  vacant  mind  they  bring 
to  the  reading  of  him ;  or  rather,  their  more  or  less 
unsympathetic  hearts.  Most  of  them  come  to  the 
banquet  of  facts  and  observations  Swedenborg  spreads 
before  them  Avith  an  obvious  gross  hankering  after 
ecclesiastical  righteousness,  and  make  the  most,  ac- 
cordingly, of  every  crumb  they  can  pick  up  adapted  to 
gratify  that  unmanly  and  dyspeptic  relish.  But  if 
you  bring  human  sympathies  to  the  banquet  in  ques- 
tion, I  can  assure  you,  you  will  find  no  speck  of  that 
base,  unworthy  nutriment.  Tor  it  cannot  be  too 
much  insisted  on,  that  no  books  address  the  reader's 
intellect  so  much  through  the  heart  as  these  of  Swe- 
denborg do,  all  in  confining  themselves  to  giving  him 
spiritual  information  merely. 

This  is  no  doubt  an  endless  stumbling-block  to  the 
mass  of  readers,  who  regard  Swedenborg  as  a  sort  of 
intellectual  tailor,  whose  shop  they  have  only  to  enter, 
to  find  whatsoever  spiritual  garments  their  particular 


ABOUT  SWEDENBORG.  67 

nakedness  craves,  all  made  to  hand.  And  when  they 
find,  as  every  one  among  them  is  sure  to  do  who  has 
any  faculty  of  spiritual  discernment,  that  there  are 
absolutely  no  garments  made  up,  but  only  an  immense 
sound  of  the  shearing  of  sheep  and  the  carding  of 
wool  and  the  whirhng  of  wheels  and  the  rattling  of 
looms  and  the  flying  of  spindles,  and  that  every  for- 
lorn wight  who  would  be  spiritually  clad  must  actu- 
ally turn  to  and  become  his  own  wool-grower,  weaver, 
and  tailor,  the  great  majority  of  course  go  away  dis- 
gusted, and  only  those  remain  whose  vocation  for 
Truth  is  so  genuine  as  to  make  any  labor  incurred  in 
her  service  welcome  if  not  pleasant.  The  case  of 
course  is  far  more  hopeless  when  one  goes  in  with 
absolutely  no  conscious  nakedness  to  cover,  but  only 
to  satisfy  a  vague  outside  curiosity  about  intellectual 
novelties,  and  make,  perchance,  a  handsome  addition 
to  an  already  luxurious  literary  Avardrobe.  But  Swe- 
denborg  is  not  now,  and  probably  never  will  be,  so 
much  the  mode  as  greatly  to  attract  this  style  of  cus- 
tomer. 

Ill  fact,  the  whole  existing  conception  of  the  man 
and  his  aims  is  a  mistake.  He  is  not  at  all  the 
intellectual  craftsman  or  quack  the  world  takes  him 
for.  He  is  no  way  remarkable  as  a  man  of  original 
thought,  or  even  as  a  reasoner,  unless  it  be  negatively 
so,  while  as  a  man  of  experience,  or  a  seer,  his  worth 


68  FURTHER  OBSERVATIONS 

is  of  the  very  highest  grade,  as  imposing  no  kind  of 
obligation  upon  your  belief.  His  judgments  doubt- 
less in  regard  to  this  world's  affairs  were  those  of 
his  day  and  generation,  and  strike  one  as  grown 
very  antiquated  ;  but  there  is  almost  no  fact  of  spirit- 
ual observation  and  experience  he  recounts  which  does 
not  seem  of  really  priceless  worth  to  my  imagination, 
as  illmtrathig  and  eiiforcinr/  a  neiv  mind  in  man.  If 
his  books  seem  interesting  to  you  also  in  this  point  of 
view,  if  they  tend  to  enlighten  you  upon  very  many 
things  which  have  puzzled  you  in  your  own  mental 
pathway,  or  in  respect  to  our  race-origin  and  des- 
tiny, well  and  good  ;  no  doubt  you  too  are  bound 
to  an  ultimate  profitable  commerce  with  them.  And 
in  this  event  you  will  find  it  unquestionably  true  that 
their  main  advantage  to  the  intellect  is,  that  they  fur- 
nish it  with  truths  which  really  nourish  and  quicken 
it,  or  irresistibly  compel  it  to  function  for  itself,  and 
independently  of  foreign  stimulus.  His  books,  in 
fact,  amount  to  nothing  so  much  as  to  an  intellectual 
wheat-field,  of  no  use  to  any  one  who  does  not  enter 
in  to  gather  and  bind  his  own  golden  sheaves,  and 
then  proceed  to  thresh  and  grind  his  grain,  to  bolt  his 
flour,  to  mix  his  bread,  to  build  it  up  and  bake  it  in 
such  shapely  and  succulent  loaves  as  his  own  intel- 
lectual bread-pan  alone  determines. 

But  revenons  a  nos  moufons.     I  have  said  that  the 


ABOUT  SWEDENBORG.  69 

main  philosophic  obligation  we  owe  to  Swedenborg 
lies  in  his  clearly  identifying  the  evil  principle  jn.. 
existence  with  selfhood.  The  Christian  truth  some- 
what prepares  us  for  this ;  but  the  church  theology  so 
overlays  and  systematically  falsifies  the  truth,  that  we 
practically  get  little  good  of  it.  This  theology,  for 
example,  identifies  evil  with  a  person  called  the  Bevil 
and  Satan,  outside  the  pale  of  human  nature,  but  inti- 
mately conversant  with  its  secret  springs,  and  both 
able  and  disposed  to  use  his  knowledge  with  the  ma- 
lign purpose  of  corrupting  all  its  subjects.  Of  course 
this  conception  was  originally  due  to  a  very  immature 
scientific  condition  of  the  mind,  when  men  had  not 
the  least  idea  of  good  and  evil  as  having  an  exclu- 
sively spiritual  or  subjective  source.  It  befits,  in  fact, 
a  strictly  mechanical  or  material  conception  of  the 
soul's  relation  to  God,  and  only  deepens  the  mystery 
it  attempts  to  explain ;  for  if  the  good  and  evil  of 
human  life  acknowledge  no  inward  root,  but  betray 
a  purely  moral,  voluntary,  or  personal  genesis,  it  can 
only  be  because  the  creative  relation  to  man  is  prima- 
rily in  fault,  being  the  power  of  an  external,  not  an 
internal,  life.  And  if  God  were  the  power  primarily 
of  an  external  life  in  man,  and  not  altogether  mediately 
tlirough  an  internal  one,  neither  creature  nor  creator 
would  ever  invite,  as  they  assuredly  would  never 
reward,  the  homage  of  an   intellectual  appreciation. 


LETTER    VIII. 


ITI^OT^  BEAR  PRIEND:— Without  doubt  I 
'P*\/i'"  ^^^  suffered  intellectually  from  the  same 
'Eri^^J  i  or  similar  unworthy  views  of  the  crea- 
tive  relation  to  man,  as  those  I  adverted 
to  in  my  last  letter.  I  had  always,  from  childhood, 
conceived  of  the  Creator  as  bearing  this  outside  rela- 
tion to  the  creature,  and  had  attributed  to  the  latter 
consequently  the  power  of  provoking  His  unmeas- 
ured hostility.  Although  these  crude  traditional 
views  had  been  much  modified  by  subsequent  re- 
flection, I  had  nevertheless  on  the  whole  been  in  the 
habit  of  ascribing  to  the  Creator,  so  far  as  my  own 
life  and  actions  were  concerned,  an  outside  discern- 
ment of  the  most  jealous  scrutiny,  and  had  accord- 
ingly put  the  greatest  possible  alertness  into  His 
service  and  worship,  until  my  will,  as  you  have  seen 
—  thoroughly  fagged  out  as  it  were  with  the  formal, 
heartless,  endless  task  of  conciliating  a  stony-hearted 
Deity  —  actually  collapsed.      This  was  a  catastrophe 


MY  MORAL  DEATH  AND  BUEIAL.         71 

far  more  tragic  to  my  feeling,  and  far  more  revolu- 
tionary in  its  intellectual  results,  than  the  actual  vio- 
lation of  any  mere  precept  of  the  moral  law  could 
be.  It  was  the  practical  abrogation  of  the  law 
itself,  through  the  unexpected  moral  inertness  of  the 
subject.  It  was  to  my  feeling  not  only  an  absolute 
decease  of  my  moral  or  voluntary  power,  but  a 
shuddering  recoil  from  my  conscious  activity  in  that 
line.  It  was  an  actual  acute  loathing  of  the  moral 
pretension  itself  as  so  much  downright  charlatanry. 
No  idiot  was  ever  more  incompetent,  practically,  to 
the  conduct  of  life  than  I,  at  that  trying  period,  felt 
myself  to  be.  It  cost  me,  in  fact,  as  much  effort  to 
go  out  for  a  walk,  or  to  sleep  in  a  strange  bed,  as  it 
would  ah  ordinary  man  to  plan  a  campaign  or  write 
an  epic  poem.  I  have  told  you  how,  in  looking  out 
of  my  window  at  the  time  at  a  flock  of  silly  sheep 
which  happened  to  be  grazing  in  the  Green  Park 
opposite,  I  used  to  envy  them  their  blissful  stupid 
ignorance  of  any  law  higher  than  their  nature,  their 
deep  unconsciousness  of  self,  their  innocence  of  all 
private  personality  and  purpose,  their  intense  moral 
incapacity,  in  short,  and  indifference.  I  would  freely, 
nay,  gladly  have  bartered  the  world  at  the  moment 
for  one  breath  of  the  spiritual  innocence  which 
the  benign  creatures  outwardly  pictured,  or  stood 
for  to  my  imagination ;  and  all  the  virtue,  or  moral 


72  PROFOUND   MORAL  ILLUSION 

righteousness,  consequently,  that  ever  illustrated  our 
specific  human  personality,  seemed  simply  foul  and 
leprous  in  comparison  with  the  deep  Divine  possi- 
bilities and  promise  of  our  common  nature,  as  these 
stood  symbolized  to  my  spiritual  sight  in  all  the  gen- 
tler human  types  of  the  merely  animate  world.  There 
seemed,  for  instance  —  lustrously  represented  to  my 
inward  sense  —  a  far  more  heavenly  sweetness  in  the 
soul  of  a  patient  overdriven  cab-horse,  or  misused 
cadger's  donkey,  than  in  all  the  voluminous  calendar 
of  Romish  and  Protestant  hagiology,  which,  sooth 
to  say,  seemed  to  me,  in  contrast  with  it,  nothing 
short  of  infernal. 

You  may  easily  imagine,  then,  with  what  relish  my 
heart  opened  to  the  doctrine  I  found  in  these  most 
remarkable  books,  of  the  sheer  and  abject  idhenome- 
nalitij  of  selfhood  in  man  ;  and  with  what  instant  alac- 
rity my  intellect  shook  its  canvas  free  to  catch  every 
breeze  of  that  virgin  unexplored  sea  of  being,  to 
which  this  doctrine,  for  the  first  time,  furnished  me 
the  clew.  Up  to  this  very  period  I  had  lived  in 
the  cheerful  faith,  nor  ever  felt  the  slightest  shadow 
of  misgiving  about  it  —  any  more,  I  venture  to  say, 
than  you  at  this  moment  feel  a  shadow  of  similar 
misgiving  in  your  own  mind  —  that  my  being  or 
substance  lay  absolutely  in  myself,  was  in  fact  iden- 
tical with  the  various  limitations  implied  in  that  most 


UNDER  WHICH  I  HAD   BEEN   LIVING.  73 

fallacious  but  still  unsuspected  quantity.  To  be  sure, 
I  had  no  doubt  that  this  being  or  self  of  mine 
(whether  actually  burdened,  or  not  burdened,  with 
its  limitations,  I  did  not  stop  to  inquire,  but  unques- 
tionably with  a  capacity  of  any  amount  of  burden- 
some limitation)  came  originally  as  a  gift  from  the 
hand  of  God ;  but  I  had  just  as  little  doubt  that  the 
moment  the  gift  had  left  God's  hand,  or  fell  into  my 
conscious  possession,  it  became  as  essentially  inde- 
pendent of  Him  in  all  spiritual  or  subjective  regards 
as  the  soul  of  a  child  is  of  its  earthly  father ;  how- 
ever much  in  material  or  objective  regards  it  might 
be  expedient  for  me  still  to  submit  to  His  external 
police.  My  moral  conscience,  too,  lent  its  influence 
to  the  same  profound  illusion  ;  for  all  the  precepts  of 
the  moral  law  being  objectively  so  good  and  real,  and 
intended  in  the  view  of  an  unenlightened  conscience 
to  make  men  righteous  in  the  sight  of  God,  I  could 
never  have  supposed,  even  had  I  been  tempted  on 
independent  grounds  to  doubt  my  own  spiritual  or 
subjective  reality,  that  so  palpably  Divine  a  law 
contemplated,  or  even  tolerated,  a  wholly  infirm  and 
fallacious  subject ;  much  less  that  it  was,  in  fact, 
altogether  devised  for  the  reproof,  condemnation,  and 
humiliation  of  such  a  subject.  I  had  no  misgiving, 
therefore,  as  to  the  manifest  purpose  of  the  Law. 
The  Divine  intent  of  it  at  least  was  as  clear  to  me  as 


74  MY  RELIEF  FEOM  IT  EQUIVALENT 

it  ever  had  been  to  the  Jew,  namely,  to  serve  as  a 
ministry  of  plain  moral  life  or  actual  righteousness 
among  men,  so  constructing  an  everlasting  heaven 
out  of  men's  warring  and  divided  personalities  :  and 
not  at  all,  as  the  apostles  taught,  a  ministry  of  death, 
to  convince  those  lolio  stood  approved  hy  it  of  sin, 
thereby  shutting  up  all  men,  good  and  evil  alike,  but 
especially  the  good,  to  unlimited  dependence  upon 
the  sheer  and  mere  mercy  of  God. 

It  was  impossible  for  me,  after  what  I  have  told  you, 
to  hold  this  audacious  faith  in  selfhood  any  longer. 
When  I  sat  down  to  dinner  on  that  memorable  chilly 
afternoon  in  Windsor,  I  held  it  serene  and  unweak- 
ened  by  the  faintest  breath  of  doubt.  Before  I  rose 
from  table  it  had  inwardly  shrivelled  to  a  cinder. 
One  moment  I  devoutly  thanked  God  for  the  inap- 
preciable boon  of  selfhood ;  the  next  that  inappreci- 
able boon  seemed  to  me  the  one  thing  damnable  on 
earth,  seemed  a  literal  nest  of  hell  within  my  own 
entrails.  Whatever  difficulties  then  stood  in  the  way 
of  a  better  faith,  they  were  infinitely  milder  and  more 
placable  than  those  inherent  in  the  old  one.  In  fact 
the  old  faith  was  itself  the  only  obstacle  in  the  path 
of  the  new.  Take  the  one  away,  and  the  other  be- 
comes inevitable.  1  If  you  admit  the  intrinsic  or  essen- 
tial phenomenality  of  selfhood  — its  utter  unreality 
or  non-existence  out  of  consciousness  —  you  are  logi- 


TO  MY  BELIEF  IN  THE  INCARNATION.  75 

cally  forced  upon  the  triitli  of  the  creative  incarna- 
tion in  the  created  nature  —  or  the  Divine  Natural 
Humanity  —  as  the  sole  possible  method  of  creation, 
as  the  only  truth  capable  of  explaining  nature  and  his- 
tory. !  When  I  ^2iy  forced,  I  take  for  granted  that  you 
have  some  rational  interest  in  the  subject ;  I  take  for 
granted  that  you  deem  nature  and  history  worthy  to 
be  explained,  and  are  not  a  mere  sensualist  so  intent 
upon  your  own  pleasure  as  to  feel  no  capacity  for 
inward  satisfactions.  In  that  case,  I  repeat,  the  only 
existing  obstacle  to  yom'  belief  in  the  necessary  incar- 
nation of  the  Creator  in  the  created  nature  in  order 
to  the  redemption  and  salvation  of  the  human  race 
from  the  empire  of  evil  and  falsity,  will  be  dissipated 
by  your  coming  to  acknowledge  the  pure  phenome- 
nality  of  consciousness,  or  to  disbelieve  in  the  spiritual 
reality  of  selfhood.  Nothing  hinders  one  believing 
in  spiritual  truth  but  the  limitary  influence  of  falsity. 
And  so,  conversely,  nothing  hinders  a  man  succumb- 
ing to  spiritual  falsity  but  the  liberating  influence 
of  truth.  So  that  the  only  possible  way  for  men  to 
arrive  at  the  spii-itual  or  living  knowledge  of  truth,  is 
by  unliving  their  natural  prejudices  and  prejudices 
of  education.  Now  the  deepest  and  most  universal 
of  these  prejudices  is  that  which  makes  selfhood  the 
greatest  of  realities,  and  consequently  inflates  the 
heart   of  man  with    all   manner   of  spiritual   pride, 


76  THE    MORAL   LAW   ESSENTIALLY 

avarice,  and  cruelty.  And  it  is  accordingly  the  con- 
quest of  this  fundamental  prejudice  which  best  pro- 
motes our  spiritual  rectitude,  or  living  conjunction 
with  God. 

We  are  now  at  the  very  focus  of  our  difference, 
and  let  me  utter  no  word  that  shall  not  be  clearly 
understood.  Nothing  can  be  farther  from  my  desire 
than  to  weaken  the  authority  of  the  moral  law,  con- 
sidered as  the  literal  aspect  of  all  true  spiritual  fel- 
lowship between  man  and  man.  When  the  sjairit  of 
fellowship  or  equality  between  men  is  absent,  then  it 
behooves  them,  as  they  love  their  manhood  and  prize 
its  salvation,  to  make  much  in  their  intercourse  with 
one  another  of  a  strict  conformity  to  the  letter  of  the 
law.  The  spirit  of  human  fellowship  or  equality  is 
mutual  love,  and  mutual  love  prompts  only  the  most 
accordant  action  between  all  its  subjects.  But  where 
mutual  love  does  not  as  yet  exist  among  men,  but  self- 
love  only  and  love  of  the  world,  and  positively  accord- 
ant or  harmonious  action  is  therefore  not  to  be  expected 
from  them,  it  becomes  all-important  to  provide  some 
natural  symbol  of  these  spontaneous  manners  —  some 
purely  negative  and  formal  reminder  of  these  ethics 
of  the  skies  —  whereby  a  faint  perfume  of  the  heavenly 
life  may  be  kept  up  among  men,  and  men  thereby  be 
prepared,  in  their  turn,  to  recognize  the  Divine  sub- 
stance itself  when  it  is  finally  ready  to  come. 


TYPICAL  AND  PROPHETIC.  77 

Now  this  precise  propaedeutic  function  is  exqui- 
sitely served  by  the  letter  of  the  law.  For  the  sub- 
ject of  this  letter  —  out  of  sincere  outward  or  formal 
reverence  for  the  Divine  name  —  is  taught  by  it 
freely  to  abstain  from  false  witness,  theft,  adultery, 
murder,  and  covetousness,  since  a  reverential  absti- 
nence from  these  evils  is  the  only  practicable  moral 
equivalent  or  ultimate  of  the  highest  spiritual  good- 
ness. To  refrain  ivhen  temjjted  from  doing  evil  be- 
cause evil  is  contrary  to  the  will  of  God,  is  the  only 
outward  rule  of  human  conduct  at  all  commensurate 
with  inward  love  to  God ;  since  it  is  the  only  rule 
which  provides  a  formal  basis  for  that  spiritual  hu- 
mility in  man,  which  is  the  sole  Divine  end  of  the 
law  for  righteousness.  Abstinence  from  evil,  then, 
is  a  necessary  condition  of  the  spiritual  or  inward 
life  in  man;  but  it  profits  a  man  only  in  so  far  as 
it  is  reverential,  or  prompted  by  a  formal  and  para- 
mount regard  for  the  Divine  will.  A  great  many 
persons  fulfil  the  law  formally  or  outwardly,  because 
it  is  reputable  so  to  do,  and  promotes  their  civic  ad- 
vantage ;  and  no  doubt  our  infirm  civilization  is  very 
much  indebted  to  these  people,  of  an  insincere  re- 
ligious character,  who  yet  do  all,  and  even  more  than 
all,  that  the  spiritual  man  does  in  the  way  of  pro- 
moting men's  outward  fellowship.  Many  persons  also, 
who  are  not  actuated  by  worldly  motives,  unaffectedly 


78  ITS  VOTARIES  MAKE  IT   UTTERLY 

mistake  the  purpose  of  the  law.  They  have  no  idea 
that  its  purpose  is  spiritual,  being  addressed  to  mak- 
ing its  subjects  humble,  or  giving  them  a  conscience 
of  death  in  themselves,  but  suppose  that  it  was  in- 
tended to  confer  actual  life  or  righteousness  upon 
them,  by  entitling  all  who  obey  it  to  permanent  Di- 
vine honor,  and  all  who  disobey  it  to  permanent 
Divine  reproach.  They  have  no  perception  that  the 
law  is  essentially  ministerial  to  the  gospel  revelation 
of  the  Divine  love,  being  intended  to  soften  the  hard 
heart  of  its  votary  —  to  knead  and  supple  it  out- 
wardly —  to  inward  Divine  issues  when  they  come. 
They  conceive,  on  the  contrary,  that  the  law  is  its 
own  end,  being  rather  magisterial  to  the  gospel  than 
ministerial,  since  they  regard  the  latter  as  being 
essentially  substitutionary  to  the  former,  or  view  it  in 
the  light  of  a  mere  tardy  Divine  concession  to  men's 
weakness,  after  the  former  had  sufficiently  demon- 
strated their  absolute  want  of  strength.  In  short, 
their  idea  of  the  law  is,  not  that  it  is  purely  pro- 
visional and  educative,  in  order  to  prepare  men  for 
becoming  spiritual  out  of  natural,  but  that  it  is  a  Di- 
vine finality,  addressed  to  the  making  men  morally 
or  actually  righteous.  And  hence  they  value  its 
formal  moral  letter  infinitely  above  its  inward  or  liv- 
ing spirit,  contenting  themselves  with  a  mere  actual 
abstinence  from  the  evils  it  denounces,  but  caring 


FLAT,  VAPID,  AND  SPIRITLESS.  79 

very  little  about  the  temper  of  mind  from  which  the 
abstinence  comes. 

Acquit  me  then,  I  pray  you,  of  any  desire  to 
diminish  the  prestige  of  the  moral  law,  considered  as 
ministering  to  the  only  true  Divine  righteousness  in 
man,  by  helping  to  bring  about  a  spirit  of  unaffected, 
unostentatious  humility  in  his  bosom.  Eor  this  is  the 
whole  spiritual  scope  of  the  law,  the  only  thing  that 
for  a  moment  sanctifies  it,  or  makes  it  holy,  to  the 
recognition  of  the  human  heart :  to  conjoin  the  wor- 
shipper with  God  by  freeing  his  heart  from  the  evil 
spirits  that  hinder  such  conjunction ;  and  every  man 
therefore  who  is  not  a  spiritual  sot,  or  whose  heart  is 
not  dead  to  all  Divine  inspiration,  gives  it  in  this  point 
of  view  his  unqualified  homage. 

But  there  comes  a  time  when  the  moral  law  no 
longer  ministers  to  the  Divine  life  in  man ;  when  it 
most  distinctly  does  not  produce  a  spirit  of  humility 
in  its  subject,  but  a  spirit  of  pride  and  self-inflation. 
The  law  is  now  wrenched  from  its  commanding  spir- 
itual uses,  which  are  all  summed  up  in  making  the 
individual  man  think  small  things  of  himself,  and 
employed  by  men  as  an  instrument  of  their  own 
material  aggrandizement.  When  the  law  is  thus 
wrested  from  its  only  proper  Divine  to  purely  human 
uses,  from  its  exclusively  spiritual  to  an  exclusively 
material  function,  it  becomes  no  longer  an  instru- 


80        THE  LAW  A  PRESENT  STENCH  IN  THE  EARTH. 

ment  of  mutual  peace  and  unity  among  men,  but  of 
mutual  self-seeking  and  warfare.  Then  the  law  from 
being  confessedly  Divine  becomes  the  most  undivine 
thing  beneath  the  skies ;  for  then  it  ministers  —  as 
nothing  else  on  earth  has  power  to  do  —  by  its 
usurped  Divine  authority,  to  the  inmost  spirit  of  hell 
in  man,  to  a  spirit  of  pride  and  self-assertion  and 
intolerance  and  lust  and  cruelty  and  revenge.  It 
was  originally  given  by  God  only  to  humble  the  pride 
of  selfhood  in  man,  that  so  the  neighbor  might  become 
exalted  in  his  regard.  It  is  most  undivinely  used  by 
man  only  as  a  cunning  instrument  ybr  sujjpressing  the 
neighbor,  or  subjecting  him  to  one's  boundless  cupidity 
and  avarice.  It  is  no  longer  Divine,  then,  but  out 
and  out  diabolic,  confessing  itself  spiritually  the  only 
fortress  of  evil  known  to  the  human  bosom.  This  is 
what  secretly  nauseates  all  good  men  with  our  legal 
righteousness,  fills  them  with  an  inward  loathing  of 
our  conventional  respectability,  sickens  them  to  death 
with  our  technical  "  Church  "  and  its  flatulent  senti- 
mentality, with  our  technical  "  State "  and  its  dis- 
honest morality.  This  is  what  makes  them  inwardly 
hate  our  existing  civilization  as,  spiritually,  a  thing 
of  infamy,  as  the  only  thing  which  stands  in  the  way 
of  the  Divine  kingdom  on  earth ;  and  they  would, 
themselves,  gladly  beat  the  drum  and  blow  the  trum- 
pet for  its  final  burial  out  of  human  sight. 


LETTER    IX. 


T  DEAR  FRIEND  :  — Don't  imagine  that 
my  reference  to  the  law  in  my  last  letter 
was  intended  merely  or  chiefly  to  illustrate 
what  Paul  says  of  the  legal  economy  under 
which  the  Jew  lived,  namely  :  that  it  was  designed  only 
to  give  its  subject  a  knowledge  of  sin.  Doubtless  this 
was  an  argument  of  great  weight  to  the  Jew,  for  he  was 
the  actual  subject  of  a  Divine  kingdom,  and  if  the  law 
of  that  kingdom  in  its  practical  scope  could  be  shown 
to  be  designedly  subversive  of  the  national  hope  to- 
wards God,  his  main  opposition  to  the  gospel  consid- 
ered as  dishonoring  the  law  would  of  course  fall  to  the 
ground.  But  this  argument  has  no  similar  pertinence 
to  us,  who  have  never  been  subjects  of  a  literal  Divine 
regimen,  and  whose  law  consequently  has  always 
claimed  a  more  or  less  strictly  spiritual  administration. 
To  be  sure,  we  have  certain  portentous  Jewish  phan- 
toms of  our  own  to  contend  with  —  certain  very 
orthodox  Christian  enemies  of  the  Divine  Spirit  —  in 


82  DIFFERENCE  BETWEEN   THE  REAL  JEW 

the  persons  of  our  Popish  and  Protestant  rituahsts, 
or  high  churchmen.  But  no  one  is  in  any  danger 
of  mistaking  these  worthless  pretenders  for  authentic 
Divine  persons,  nor  of  gravely  combating  their  eccle- 
siastical fopperies  and  gross  covert  disloyalty  to  the 
human  ideal.  They  are  not  natural  Jews,  but  only 
spiritual  or  spm-ious  ones :  only  simulated  or  imi- 
tative ones.  They  are  not  the  pure  gold  of  the 
sanctuary,  once  famous  but  now  vanished  from  earth 
forever :  they  are  a  mere  counterfeit  and  pinchbeck 
image  of  it,  with  a  view  to  impose  upon  simple  and 
credulous  imaginations.  Their  ecclesiastical  preten- 
sion is  in  itself  an  inversion  of  the  most  fundamental 
principle  of  spiritual  order,  which  is,  that  the  natural 
in  every  case  descend  from  the  spiritual :  while  they, 
on  the  contrary,  are  the  direct  spiritual  progeny  of  a 
very  ugly  and  sordid  natural  parentage.  Thus,  they 
are  by  no  means  actually  living  under  a  specific  Divine 
regimen,  but  only  "  making  believe "  that  they  are. 
They  have  not  so  much  even  as  a  q^iiasi  Divine  obli- 
gation on  their  consciences  to  do  what  they  do ;  they 
only  act  as  if  they  had.  This,  you  perceive,  makes 
all  the  difference  in  the  world  between  the  honest 
natural  Jew  and  our  own  dishonest  spiritual  ones, 
and  shows  moreover  the  admirable  reason  why  Christ 
called  these  latter,  in  the  persons  of  their  representa- 
tive tj^pes  at  his  day,  "hypocrites,"  that  is,  actors, 


AND  THE  CHRISTIAN   IMITATION.  83 

unconsciously  playing  a  part  to  which  they  are  noway 
Divinely  summoned.  We  may  then  safely  leave  all 
our  spectacular  prodigies  in  this  line  to  Christ's  con- 
cise characterization  of  them,  assured  that  nothing 
of  harm  can  ensue  to  any  serious  interest  of  the  world 
from  so  strictly  histrionic  an  activity. 

But  the  apostles  had  to  deal  with  a  much  less 
effeminate  and  contemptible  class  of  zealots,  whose 
superstitious  regard  for  their  own  law  threatened, 
indeed,  to  stop  the  world's  progress,  so  hearty  and 
malignant  was  their  opposition  to  that  gospel  which 
the  apostles  proclaimed,  and  whose  sole  burden  was 
that  Jesus  of  Nazareth  was  the  Christ.  They  esteemed 
their  own  law  a  living  Divine  one  already  as  to  the 
minutest  jot  or  tittle  of  its  letter,  and  this  purported 
to  bless  them  exclusively  as  children  of  Abraham. 
How  could  they  conceive,  then,  that  the  law  had, 
•as  the  apostles  taught,  a  far  more  living,  or  inward 
and  Divine  spiuit,  purporting  to  bless  them  only  as 
they  renounced  their  Jewish  selves,  and  identified 
their  interests  with  those  of  the  Gentile  world  ?  In 
fact,  this  tiresome  and  frivolous  letter  of  their  law 
inspired  them  with  so  frenzied  and  fanatical  a  regard 
as  having  a  purely  Jewish  end,  that  it  at  last  left 
them  in  all  intellectual  respects  hopelessly  blind  and 
imbecile.  It  was  a  timely  office  in  Paul,  therefore,  to 
remind  his  unenlightened  countrymen  of  the  deadly 


84  WE  LIVE  NOT  UNDER  A  LITERAL   BUT 

animus  of  their  law  towards  every  one  who  boasted 
of  its  literal  friendship.  Even  natural  death,  he  ar- 
gued, would  be  harmless  if  it  were  not  for  the  law. 
"  The  sting  of  death  is  doubtless  sin  :  but  then  it  is 
only  the  law  that  gives  us  a  conscience  of  sin.  The 
sole  strength  of  sin  is  the  law ;  and  every  subject  of 
the  law,  therefore,  who  sees  its  intention  to  be  to 
give  men  a  knowledge  of  sin  and  not  of  righteousness, 
will  bless  God  that  it  was  never  a  final  dispensation, 
but  at  best  a  preparatory  one  for  the  gospel  we  now 
proclaim.  The  law  may  be  best  viewed,  in  fact, 
under  the  similitude  of  a  respectable  pedagogue,  in 
charge  of  a  school  of  turbulent  urchins,  whom  if  he 
can  make  even  tolerably  sensible  of  their  own  vast 
deficiencies  in  point  of  culture,  he  will  deem  his  duty 
done  towards  them,  and  contentedly  leave  them  to  the 
chances  of  their  future  manhood." 

This,  I  repeat,  was  a  very  important  truth  to  those 
to  whom  it  was  addressed,  a  typical  "  outside  "  people, 
subjects  of  an  external  Divine  law,  who  were  di- 
rected to  an  external  Divine  Saviour  as  the  veritable 
end  of  their  law  for  righteousness.  In  short,  the  Jew 
was  notoriously  a  frivolous  subject — as  near  to  worth- 
less as  a  people  could  well  be  that  still  wore  the 
human  form  —  and  cultivating  only  such  base  ideas 
of  the  Divine  righteousness  as  stood  in  a  mere  "  out- 
side cleansing  of  the  cup  and  platter,  while  inwardly 


A  SPIRITUAL  DIVINE  ADMINISTRATION.  85 

they  were  full  of  extortion  and  excess."  But  it  ought, 
I  repeat,  to  be  particularly  and  frankly  noted  that 
this  apostolic  reasoning  has  no  special  relevancy  to  us 
at  this  day,  who  have  always  lived  not  under  a  literal 
but  an  exclusively  spiritual  Divine  dispensation.  Our 
forefathers,  in  the  revolution  they  accomplished,  sim- 
ply designed  to  free  themselves  and  their  descendants 
from  political  vassalage  to  England.  But  in  the  form 
they  subsequently  impressed  upon  their  work  they 
builded  greatly  better  than  they  designed,  or  even 
than  they  themselves  suspected,  For  in  disowning, 
as  they  resolutely  did,  an  authoritative  Church  and  a 
consecrated  State,  they  managed  quite  unconsciously 
to  swing  clear,  not  only  of  political  and  ecclesiastical 
England,  but  of  literal  Christendom  as  well :  which 
derives  its  form  or  quality  from  those  two  disowned  in- 
stitutions exclusively.  The  result  is  that  we,  their 
descendants,  are  denizens  henceforth  of  spiritual 
Christendom  only.  For  so  far  as  we  confess  ourselves 
their  legitimate  children,  logically  approving  of  and 
identified  with  their  acts,  we  frankly  acknowledge 
ourselves  with  respect  to  the  rest  of  the  world  a  new 
or  spiritual  people,  sifted  from  the  nations  as  wheat  is 
sifted  from  chaff;  amenable  only  to  a  living  or  inward 
and  imprescriptible  Divine  Law  in  our  own  bosoms 
—  that  of  our  growing  humanitary  affections  and 
thoughts ;  perfectly  atheistic  therefore,  if  need  be,  in 


86  GROWING  INDIFFERENCE  OF  MEN 

SO  far  as  our  faith  is  due  to  any  merely  instituted  Deity, 
that  is,  any  Deity  outside  of  our  own  nature;  per- 
fectly irresponsible  and  immoral,  if  need  be,  so  far  as 
our  obedience  is  due  to  any  merely  putative,  or  arbi- 
trary and  established.  Divine  order :  that  is  to  say, 
any  order  not  strictly  conformed  to  the  recognized 
principles  of  human  nature. 

If  you  will  pardon  me  a  slight  digression  here,  I 
would  like  to  observe  that  what  I  have  just  said  ex- 
plains the  reason  why  the  spiritual  world  —  the  world 
of  heaven  and  hell  —  has  undergone  such  dire  eclipse, 
or  fallen  so  completely  under  the  shadow  of  the 
natural  world,  that  men  no  longer  scruple  to  claim 
a  direct  commerce  with  God,  even  in  the  flesh,  and 
therefore  not  only  reject  all  so-called  "  spiritual "  au- 
thority as  obsolete  or  impertinent,  but  are  fast  grow- 
ing indifferent  even  to  their  once  highly  prized  civic 
righteousness.*  It  is  impossible  to  watch  the  fatal 
demoralization  which  of  late  years  has  been  creeping 

*  Tills  of  course  outside  the  technical  churcli.  The  state  of  things 
within  the  church  is  strictly  and  strikingly  parallel  to  that  -vrituessed 
at  its  founder's  first  or  carnal  coming.  That  is  to  say,  the  Jew  vindi- 
cated his  legal  or  formal  orthodoxy  at  whatever  cost  of  shame  and  suf- 
fering to  the  person  of  him  who  alone  constituted  its  prophetic  scope  or 
substance.  And  the  professing  Christian  church  avouches  its  fidelity  to 
the  person  of  Christ,  by  reviling,  evil-entreating,  and  persecuting  every 
interest.  Divine  and  human,  which  makes  his  person  spiritually  vener- 
able or  memorable. 


TO  THEIR  CIVIC  REPUTE.  87 

over  men  in  positions  of  public  and  private  trust,  and 
still  believe  that  citizenship  is  estimated  as  it  once 
was,  or  that  men  in  general  still  retain  their  respect 
for  any  merely  instituted  sanctity  or  decency  under 
heaven.  Freedom,  and  no  longer  force,  has  become 
the  acknowledged  ethics  of  the  Divine  administration, 
to  the  consequent  enfeebling  of  the  obligations  of 
outward  law ;  and  this  enlarged  consciousness  on  our 
part  brings  with  it  a  new  and  wholly  spiritual  con- 
ception of  creative  power.  It  enforces  in  us  such  a 
growing  sense  of  harmony  between  the  Divine  and 
human  natures,  as  must  erelong  thoroughly  foreclose 
the  old  controversy  of  flesh  and  spirit  —  the  church 
and  the  world  —  and  reduce  ritual  religion  itself  to 
a  mere  code  of  good  manners. 

I  have  no  desire  and  no  right  to  confirm  what  I 
say  by  reference  to  my  own  personal  history;  but 
I  cannot  help  confessing,  by  way  of  illustration,  that 
I  myself  have  found  few  things  for  the  last  thirty  or 
forty  years  more  fatiguing  to  my  regenerate  inward 
sense  —  less  accommodated  to  my  growing  conviction 
of  God's  NATURAL  humanity — than  our  current  eccle- 
siastical culture.  Nothing  could  be  pleasanter  than 
"  going  to  church "  upon  certain  holidays  —  every 
holiday  in  fact  —  and  losing  oneself  in  the  great  con- 
gregation, if  the  worship  were  only  sincere  and  inno- 
cent.    But  no  worship  can  be  sincere  or  innocent 


88  OUR  CURRENT  ECCLESIASTICAL  CULTURE 

which  is  not  first  of  all  disinterested  or  spontaneous. 
If  any  gain  however  small  is  hoped  to  be  realized  from 
observing  it,  if  any  loss  however  small  is  feared  to  be 
incurred  from  neglecting  it,  the  worship  confesses 
itself  mercenary ;  and  surely  nothing  can  be  more 
remote  from  spiritual  innocence  than  a  mercenary 
habit  of  mind  in  Divine  things.  All  living  or  accep- 
table worship  is  free,  unforced,  spontaneous,  as  ex- 
pressing a  heart  and  mind  unaffectedly  reconciled  to 
God ;  and  who  shall  pretend  to  be  at  peace  with 
God  that  has  yet  anything  to  ask  or  expect  at  the 
Divine  hands? 

Nothing,  it  appears  to  me,  can  be  more  utterly 
worthless  and  even  degrading,  in  a  spiritual  estima- 
tion, both  to  oneself  and  to  society,  than  a  life  passed 
in  ritual  devotion,  or  the  exercises  of  formal  piety. 
It  is  an  insult  to  God  and  man  to  dignify  so  sodden 
a  routine  with  the  sacred  name  of  life ;  call  it  rather 
death  and  damnation  to  every  soul  of  man  that  finds 
it  life.  I  wonder  above  all  how  any  one  who  rever- 
ences even  the  letter  alone  of  the  New  Testament, 
and  remembers  the  terrible  warnings  and  objurga- 
tions it  denounces  upon  a  mere  conventional  or  legal 
hope  towards  God,  can  dare  to  associate  his  spiritual 
fortunes  with  our  modern  ecclesiastical  Judaism. 
The  visible  Church  seems  to  me  in  a  spiritual  or 
philosophic  point  of  view  to  be   "  the  abomination 


FRIVOLOUS  AND   UNMANLY.  89 

of  desolation " ;  a  refuge  and  embodiment  of  the 
frankest  spiritual  egotism  and  the  rankest  spiritual 
cupidity.  Its  pharisaic  airs  and  temper  provoke  one 
to  alternate  smiles  and  tears :  smiles,  to  see  such 
transparent  spiritual  pride  simulating  the  aspect  and 
language  of  humility;  tears,  to  see  so  many  well- 
to-do  worldly-wise  people  inwardly  hardening  them- 
selves against  the  access  and  solicitation  of  God's 
tenderest  and  most  timely  pity  in  our  nature. 

How  blasphemous,  then,  to  talk  of  God's  life  at 
this  time  of  day  in  any  such  self-righteous  precinct ! 
How  inevitable,  one  might  say,  its  encounter  almost 
everywhere  else,  especially  where  there  is  no  pretension 
to  anything  but  a  secular  temper.  I  can  hardly  flatter 
myself  that  the  frankly  chaotic  or  «-cosmical  aspect 
of  our  ordinary  street-car  has  altogether  escaped  your 
enlightened  notice  in  your  visits  to  the  city ;  and  it 
will  perhaps  surprise  you,  therefore,  to  learn  that  I 
nevertheless  continually  witness  so  much  mutual  for- 
bearance on  the  part  of  its  habifMes ;  so  much  spotless 
acquiescence  under  the  rudest  personal  jostling  and 
inconvenience ;  such  a  cheerful  renunciation  of  one's 
strict  right ;  such  an  amused  deference,  oftentimes,  to 
one's  invasive  neighbor  :  in  short,  and  as  a  general 
thing,  such  a  heavenly  self-shrinkage  in  order  that 
"  the  neighbor,"  handsome  or  unhandsome,  whole- 
some or  unwholesome,  may  sit  or  stand  at  ease :  that 


90  THE  HORSE-CAR  OUR  TRUE 

I  not  seldom  find  myself  inwardly  exclaiming  with 
the  patriarch  :  Hoto  dreadful  is  tJiis  place  !  It  is  none 
other  than  the  house  of  God,  and  the  gate  of  heaven. 
Undeniably  on  its  material  or  sensuous  side  the 
vehicle  has  no  claim  to  designation  as  a  Bethel ;  but 
at  such  times  on  its  spiritual  or  supersensuous  side 
it  seems  to  my  devout  sense  far  more  alert  with  the 
holy  Ghost,  far  more  radiant  and  palpitating  with 
the  infinite  comity  and  loveliness,  than  any  the  most 
gorgeous  and  brutal  ecclesiastical  fane  that  ever 
gloomed  and  stained  the  light  of  heaven. 

But  I  only  allege  this  familiar  experience  as  a 
sample  of  the  way  in  which,  to  our  quickened  or 
regenerate  perception,  persons  and  places  and  things 
that  have  been  hitherto  conventionally  most  sacred, 
are  ready  and  eager  to  confess  themselves  profane, 
to  confess  themselves  in  fact  sheer  spiritual  rubbish ; 
while  things  and  persons  and  places  hitherto  reputed 
especially  forlorn  and  commonplace  are  becoming 
spiritually  hallowed,  becoming  inwardly  vivid  and 
picturesque  with  God's  revealed  modesty,  truth,  and 
mercy. 

And  now  that  this  digression  is  ended,  let  me 
return  to  my  subject,  and  say  that  my  purpose  in 
referring  to  Paul's  famous  contention  about  the 
spiritual  import  of  the  law  is  quite  different  from 
his,  though  doubtless  it  lies  in  the  same  philosophic 


SHECHINAH  AT  THIS  DAY.  91 

direction.  Paul  was  content  to  show  that  the  law 
being  spiritual,  could  not  but  be  fatal  to  the  claim 
of  a  moral  or  actual  righteousness  among  men  :  that 
it  condemned  those  only  of  its  subjects  who  stood 
literally  justified  by  it,  and  justified  those  only  who 
confessed  themselves  literally  condemned  by  it :  be- 
cause the  former,  in  arrogating  merit  to  themselves 
and  ascribing  blame  to  others,  violated  the  spirit  of 
the  law,  which  was  charity,  or  neighborly  love ;  and 
because  the  latter  gave  evidence  of  that  humility  of 
spirit  which  is  the  only  and  inseparable  basis  of  charity, 
or  neighborly  love. 

But  this  does  not  content  me.  I  admire  the  apos- 
tle's profound  critical  insight,  it  is  true,  and  applaud 
the  lesson  conveyed  by  it  with  all  my  heart ;  but  I 
cannot  help  going  on  to  say  that  if  such  be  the  one 
unflinching  spirit  of  all  Divine  law  upon  earth,  namely, 
to  reveal  the  evil  which  is  latent  in  all  men  by  nature, 
and  so  lay  an  eternal  basis  for  a  spirit  of  charity  or 
good  neighborhood  in  the  human  breast,  why  then 
it  becomes  at  once  grandly  evident  that  the  estijnate 
formed  by  God  of  every  man  of  woman  born  —  the 
morally  good  no  less  than  the  morally  evil  man  —  dif- 
fers infinitely,  or  in  kind,  from  the  estimate  formed  by 
man  himself. 

It  is  evident,  for  example,  that  whereas  the  latter, 
for  lack  of  spiritual  apprehension  of  the  Divine  law. 


92  CHRIST'S   PRECISE  WORK   ON   EARTH. 


regards  the  moral  differences  of  men  as  final  or  abso- 
lute, the  former  regards  all  men  —  the  morally  good 
and  the  morally  evil  man  both  alike  —  as  blent  in 
one  and  the  same  community  of  evil  so  long  as  they 
are  disaffected  to  the  spirit  of  the  law,  which  is  one 
of  charity,  or  mutual  love. 

But  much  more  than  this  is  evident.  For  it  is  evi- 
dent that  while  man  attributes  to  himself  alone  the 
source  and  the  consequent  responsibility  of  his  evil 
moral  acts,  the  Divine  mind  stigmatizes  this  senti- 
ment as  false,  or  sets  the  individual  evil  doer  free  by 
charging  his  shortcomings  to  the  common  stock  of 
human  nature. 

But  even  this  is  a  very  small  part  of  what  is  evident. 
For  if  the  Divine  wisdom  imputes  no  guilt  to  the 
individual  man,  but  charges  all  the  evil  done  by  men 
to  the  account  of  their  common  nature,  why  then  it 
is  evident  that  inasmuch  as  no  man  can  feel  himself 
responsible  for  his  natural  but  only  for  his  personal 
limitations,  so  he  is  bound  to  look  to  God  alone  for 
the  final  reconstitution  of  human  nature  in  harmony 
with  His  own  infinite  goodness. 

Now  this  Divine  resuscitation  of  our  nature, 

or     COMPLETE     UNITION     OF     IT    WITH     THE     INEFFABLE 

DIVINE  PERFECTION,  is  precisely  the  work  which  Swe- 
denborg  ascribes  to  Jesus  Christ. 


LETTER     X. 


^Y  DEAR  FRIEND:  — When  I  began 
writing  these  letters  I  imagined  myself 
able  to  say  all  I  wanted  to  say  within  the 
compass  of  ten  short  letters,  at  most :  and 
this  after  making  a  generous  allowance  to  the  weakness 
of  my  nerves.  But  the  allowance  apparently  was  not 
generous  enough,  and  the  consequence  is  that  I  find 
myself,  at  the  opening  of  my  tenth  letter,  only  fairly 
abreast  of  the  great  truth  of  the  Incarnation,  to  which 
nevertheless  everything  else  I  have  said  was  meant 
to  be  strictly  subordinate.  My  nerves,  in  fact,  are 
like  a  spirited  horse,  out  of  whom  you  may  coax  a 
good  deal  of  service  if  you  use  patient  and  persuasive 
methods,  but  who  violently  resents  and  resists  the 
coercion  of  whip  and  spur.  What  then  remains  to 
be  done?  Shall  I,  like  a  vicious  horse,  leave  my 
work  unfinished  ?  Or  shall  I  go  on  to  bring  it  still 
to  such  orderly  close  as  my  infirmities  will  permit  ? 
I  choose  the  latter  course,  although  the  bulk  of  my 


94  SWEDENBORG'S  INTERPRETATION 

scribble  be  unduly  augmented  thereby,  simply  because 
I  bate  to  leave  entirely  unreported  certain  exjplicanda 
in  relation  to  the  great  truth  of  the  Incarnation,  which 
may  be  of  use  in  softening  if  not  altogether  obviating 
your  prejudices  against  it.  I  know  that  these  preju- 
dices are  due  mainly  to  the  very  dense  ignorance  we 
all  of  us  cherish  with  respect  to  spiritual  life  and 
order.  And  if  I  may  only  say  some  word  which  shall 
induce  you  to  have  recourse  to  Swedenborg's  books, 
where  the  amplest  information  of  the  sort  needed  is 
supplied,  and  where  all  one's  intellectual  unrest  and 
perturbation  of  every  kind  find  themselves  tenderly 
soothed  and  placated,  I  shall  be  happy. 

I  had  best,  perhaps,  state  first  of  all  what  the 
apotheosis  of  our  nature  in  the  person  of  Jesus 
Christ,  as  reported  in  Swedenborg's  pages,  practi- 
cally amounts  to ;  and  then  make  such  comments 
upon  it  in  detail  as  may  be  needful  to  commend  the 
truth  to  your  awakened  attention. 

The  truth,  then,  as  I  find  it  in  Swedenborg,  prac- 
tically amounts  to  this,  namely  :  an  alleged  redemption 
of  human  nature  —  from  what  ?  — from  the  spiritual 
limitations  and  disabilities  imposed  upon  it  hy  heaven 
and  hell ;  and  the  consequent  unlimited  pm^ification 
of  that  nature  into  harmony  with  the  Divine  perfec- 
tion. 

Mind  well  what  I  say  here.    I  say  that  the  redemp- 


OF  THE  GOSPEL.  95 


tion  of  human  nature  means  its  redemption  from 
certain  evils  which,  are  by  no  means  incident  to  it  in 
virtue  of  its  own  quahty,  but  are  imposed  upon  it 
through  the  influence  of  the  spiritual  world  —  mean- 
ing thereby  the  realm  of  heaven  and  hell — upon 
the  individual  subjects  of  the  nature. 

But  here  you  will  ask  me :  "  What  is  the  necessity 
for  what  you  call  the  spiritual  world,  or  the  divided 
realm  of  heaven  and  hell,  in  the  scheme  of  creation  ?  " 
To  which  I  might  as  briefly  answer :  "  The  spiritual 
world,  or  its  division  into  heaven  and  hell,  is  a  neces- 
sary incident  of  the  cleansing  of  human  nature  from 
evil,  and  its  consequent  complete  impletion  or  unition 
with  the  Divine  perfection." 

But  here  again  a  new  question  confronts  me : 
Whence  then  this  liability  to  evil  in  human  nature  ? 
What,  in  other  words,  is  the  origin  of  spiritual  evil  in 
men,  or  the  evil  which  attaches  to  them  by  nature  ? 
For  one  rightly  reasons  that  if  the  spiritual  world  by 
unduly  influencing  individual  minds  on  earth  ends 
by  vitiating  or  corrupting  human  nature  itself,  it  is 
important  to  know  how  so  malign  an  influence  ever 
becomes  exerted  by  the  spiritual  world.  We  can 
perfectly  understand  how  physical  evil,  or  the  evil 
which  man  suffers,  originates :  namely,  in  a  want  of 
harmony  between  himself  and  his  own  body.  One 
knows  too  very  well  how  vioral  evil,  or  the  evil  which 


96  THE  ORIGIN   OF 


man  does,  comes  about :  namely,  from  a  want  of  free 
harmonic  adjustment  in  the  relations  of  man  to  man. 
But  here  is  an  evil  incomparably  deeper  than  both  of 
these,  because  it  is,  in  fact,  their  very  and  exclusive 
root :  not  the  paltry  and  passing  evil  under  which 
man  is  passive,  as  jjain  ;  nor  yet  the  still  more  super- 
ficial and  remediable  evil  in  which  he  is  active,  as 
vice  and  crime :  but  spiritual  evil,  or  the  evil  which 
he  is,  an  evil  which  characterizes  him  in  relation  to 
his  own  vital  consciousness,  and  if  not  removed  there- 
fore must  utterly  palsy  his  consciousness  considered 
as  a  means  of  development  to  his  nature. 

This  gigantic  and  hopeless  evil  in  man,  then,  springs 
from  no  defect  of  his  physical  nor  of  his  moral  make, 
but  wholly  from  the  limitation  and  infirmity  of  his 
finite  or  personal  consciousness,  which  is  a  most 
rigid  SELF-consciousness,  excluding  any  other  than  a 
subjective  basis ;  whereas  it  has  manifestly  no  warrant 
in  the  creative  infinitude,  which  is  the  infinitude  of 
Love,  to  have  any  but  an  objective  basis,  that  is,  to 
be  anything  but  a  social  consciousness,  embracing  the 
neighbor  along  with  the  self,  or  involving  a  public  and 
private  element  quite  equally.  But  you  will  ask  why 
the  creature  of  God  is  thus  shut  up  in  his  beginnings 
to  a  conscious  or  phenomenal  existence  in  himself, 
instead  of  being  endowed  outright  with  his  creator's 
vital  substance  or  being?     It  is  that  God,  by  the 


SPIRITUAL  EVIL.  97 


necessity  of  his  perfection,  cannot  permit  any  other 
than  a  phenomenal  or  conscious  existence  to  his  crea- 
ture, so  long  as  the  latter  remains  wholly  inexpert, 
or  untried  and  undisciplined,  in  the  utter  spiritual 
death  or  nothingness  which  he  bears  about  in  him- 
self as  finitely  constituted,  and  which  whilst  the  inex- 
perience lasts  makes  it  impossible  to  commit  the 
Divine  substance  or  being  to  him.  The  creator 
himself  is  of  course  the  only  real  or  natural  life  of 
the  creature  —  as  is  implied  in  the  very  terms  of  the 
proposition :  but  how  is  the  creature  ever  livingly 
to  learn  this  great  truth?  His  creator  is  not  the 
least  a  denizen  of  space  and  time;  is  not  the  least 
a  visible  or  outward  existence,  so  that  his  senses  will 
afford  him  at  best  but  a  reflected  or  lifeless  knowl- 
edge of  Him.  Evidently  then  the  creature  demands 
some  other  avenue  to  Divine  knowledge  than  sense  — 
some  inward  avenue,  since  the  creator  is  not  to  be 
found  outside  of  him  —  and  this  inward  avenue  is 
supplied  by  consciousness,  or  ^e^-knowledge.  In 
proportion  as  I  come  truly  to  know  myself  in  all 
the  compass  of  my  physical,  moral,  and  spiritual  dis- 
ability, do  I  come  to  a  living  or  hearty  apprehension 
of  God's  infinitude.  A7id  in  no  other  way.  All  the 
bibles,  all  the  churches,  all  the  sacraments,  all  the 
rites  and  ceremonies,  all  the  priesthoods  in  the  land, 
are  totally  impotent  to  confer  upon  me  one  fibre  of 


98  CREATION  INEVITABLY  CONTRACTS 

this  living  knowledge  of  God  whicli  is  given  by  my 
life  or  consciousness  alone;  however  much  I  doubt 
not  they  may  instruct  my  intellect  in  things  pertaining 
and  subsidiary  to  such  knowledge.  Thus  until  the 
creature's  own  life  or  consciousness  be  so  tried,  dis- 
ciplined, or  pm'ified  as  readily  to  yield  him  this  living 
lore :  until  he  be  inwardly  or  SELF-taught,  in  other 
words,  to  discern  the  ineffable  holiness  which  under- 
lies and  transfigures  his  own  boundless  cupidity  and 
cruelty :  he  w^ill  necessarily  refuse  to  receive  or  repro- 
duce that  only  real  or  unconscious  life  which  is  God, 
and  must  accordingly  be  content  for  a  time  to  put  up 
with  the  unreal  or  seeming  and  fallacious  life  of  self- 
hood. This  beggarly  life  will  doubtless  seem  to  the 
creature,  while  he  is  still  unconscious  of  any  inner  or 
higher  and  better  life,  most  real  and  stupendous;  and 
it  will  indeed  in  the  miraculous  providence  of  God, 
and  through  all  his  blindness  however  fatuous,  serve 
as  an  admirable  basis  of  experience  to  him,  slowly 
but  surely  promoting  the  final  evolution  of  his  real  or 
natural  life ;  but  in  itself,  or  absolutely,  the  personal 
or  conscious  life — this  life  of  selfhood — is  not  merely 
worthless,  but  ruinous,  and  Schopenhauer  and  the 
rest  of  our  purblind  modern  Buddhists,  from  their 
unchristian  point  of  view,  do  every  way  well  to  exe- 
crate it. 

And  now,  having  answered  your  doubt,  I  return  to 


SOIL  ON  ITS  SUBJECTIVE  SIDE.  99 

my  subject.  The  ineradicable  imperfection  of  created 
existence,  as  such,  or  the  origin  of  spiritual  evil  in  the 
creature,  consists,  as  we  have  seen,  in  his  attributing 
to  himself  a  rigidly  personal  or  finite  consciousness, 
and  so  perverting  the  creative  energy  and  influx  in 
him  to  purely  selfish  or  unsocial  issues.  The  creature 
is  of  course  perfectly  unaware  of  this  evil,  and  is  as 
innocent  of  any  intention  to  bring  it  about  as  the 
child  unborn.  He  is  himself  as  yet  the  spiritually 
unborn  child  of  God  —  a  mere  embryo  of  still  unde- 
veloped Divine  possibilities  in  his  nature  —  and  one 
does  n't  expect  to  find  any  divinely  normal  or  natural 
results  in  himself  or  his  surroundings.  It  seems 
indeed  inevitable  to  any  Divine  creation  —  and  this 
simply  because  it  is  Divine  or  infinite  —  that  it  should 
always  exhibit  soil  or  taint  upon  its  subjective  side, 
or  present  spiritually  the  strongest  possible  antago- 
nism to  its  creator.  At  least  I  myself  do  not  see  how, 
otherwise,  the  creative  perfection  or  infinitude  as  the 
hringer  of  good  out  of  evil,  is  ever  going  to  be  vindi- 
cated by  it.  The  creature  as  we  have  seen  can  never 
come  to  the  conception  of  the  creative  infinitude 
through  the  senses,  because  the  senses  themselves  are 
a  grossly  limitary  power,  or  witness  exclusively  to  the 
finite.  He  must  come  to  it  then  only  from  within, 
or  livingly,  that  is  to  say :  as  that  infinitude  makes 
itself  manifest  to  him   through  consciousness  or  the 


100  CREATION  AS  A   SPIRITUAL  WORK 

development  of  his  own  nature.  If  the  divine  infini- 
tude be,  as  it  undeniably  is,  a  purely  inward  one  — 
if  it  attach  to  the  creative  name  or  character,  and  not 
to  His  works,  thus  to  what  He  is  in  himself,  or  essen- 
tially, and  not  to  what  He  is  in  his  creature,  or  exis- 
tentially  —  then  the  sole  worthy  judgment  we  can 
form  of  it  must  necessarily  reflect  in  the  first  place 
our  experience  of  our  fnife  selves,  or  express  above 
all  things  our  essential  diff'erence  in  kind  from  the 
Creator.  It  must  be  a  judgment  in  fact  confessing 
all  creatureship  to  be  a  state  of  otherness  or  aliena- 
tion to  the  Creator,  and  as  such  otherness  or  alienation 
finite  or  imperfect.  In  other  words  —  for  I  confess 
the  living  sentiment  is  not  easily  put  into  adequate 
form  —  our  only  spiritual  or  living  acknowledgment 
of  the  creative  infinitude,  is  an  internal  or  worshipful 
acknowledgment,  implying  our  own  inward  self-efiace- 
ment,  our  own  free  or  spontaneous  death  to  ourselves. 
Thus  it  is  a  homage  of  the  heart  which  the  Creator 
covets  in  the  first  instance  from  the  creature,  and  only 
by  remote  derivation  thence  of  the  intellect :  and  this 
not  with  any  absurd  view  of  course  to  aggrandize 
Himself  by  the  puny  homage  of  the  creature,  but 
only  with  a  view  to  its  softening  the  latter's  sense  of 
otherness  or  alienation  to  Himself,  so  rendering  him 
accessible  to  all  those  Divine  traits  of  tenderness, 
gentleness,  and  pity  infinite,  whereby  he  is  destined 


OF  GOD   IS  PLAINLY  MIRACULOUS,  101 

one  day  to  live :  for  heart-homage,  as  we  know  from 
our  own  secular  experience  even,  is  full  of  profound 
humility  on  the  subject's  part,  being  convertible  in- 
deed in  every  case  into  a  confession  of  sin  ;  and  you 
know  with  what  reluctance  the  intellect  reverberates 
any  such  confession. 

Almost  obviously  then  we  may  say  —  may  we  not, 
my  dear  friend?  —  that  all  spiritual  or  subjective 
creation,  as  expressing  the  infinite  love,  or  inmost 
heart,  of  the  Creator,  is  ex  vi  terminoriim  or  by  virtue 
of  such  infinitude,  miraculous.  Tor  it  is  no  out- 
ward or  material  result  that  is  aimed  at  by  such  a 
process,  but  a  purely  inward  or  conscious  one,  and  it 
involves  therefore  spiritually  the  humiliation  of  crea- 
tive substance  to  created  form,  and  suspends  its  own 
actual  achievement  upon  the  Creator  showing  him- 
self able  by  means  of  such  spiritual  humiliation  to 
lead  captivity  captive,  or  rise  triumphant  over  death 
and  hell,  by  exalting  the  created  nature  into  com- 
plete unison  with  his  perfection.  At  all  events,  we 
may  say  with  entire  certainty,  that  the  creative  en- 
ergy in  the  actual  creation  —  and  simply  because  it 
is  creative,  having  therefore  no  other  vent  for  itself, 
or  field  of  manifestation,  than  its  creature's  conscious- 
ness —  is  not  only  fairly  shut  up  to  that  finite  abode 
such  as  it  is,  or  whatever  be  its  intrinsic  limitations, 
but  freely  engages  itself  precisely  there  to  avouch 


102  AND  THEREFORE  ADMITS  NO  WITNESS 

and  make  intelligible  its  own  majestic  infinitude,  by 
permanently  rescuing  the  created  nature  from  tlie 
keeping  of  the  created  subject,  and  enlarging  or  glo- 
rifying it  into  Divine  proportions. 

—  I  have  a  vague  sense  of  having  said  very  nearly 
what  I  wanted  to  say  in  this  letter,  and  yet  on  re- 
flection I  am  not  sure  about  it.  I  feel  such  a  mental 
impotence  in  regard  to  the  ineffable  theme,  such  a 
sense  of  silent  and  amazed  and  abashed  truth  in  rela- 
tion to  it,  that,  say  what  I  may,  I  can  hardly  feel  sure 
of  having  said  anything  to  the  purpose.  This  comes, 
I  suppose,  from  the  creative  truth  appealing  for  recep- 
tion so  exclusively  to  the  heart  in  the  first  place,  and 
disposing  one  rather  to  mute  adoring  wonder  than  to 
voluble  appreciation.  I  confess  for  my  part  that  this 
truth  of  the  spiritual  creation,  or  of  God's  natural 
humanity,  is  in  itself  so  grand  and  unexpected  as 
utterly  to  beggar  my  imagination  at  the  start,  and 
make  me  more  abjectly  thankful  for  positive  knowl- 
edge about  it,  such  as  I  find  in  Swedenborg's  books, 
than  I  have  ever  been  for  my  daily  bread.  And  pre- 
cisely the  most  fundamental  point  of  that  knowledge 
is  what  I  have  been  trying  to  make  plain  to  you, 
namely :  that  creation  is  a  subjective  or  living  and 
spiritual  achievment  of  Divine  love  and  wisdom  with- 
in the  strictest  precincts  of  human  nature,  and  that 
it  accordingly  neither  appeals  to  nor  admits  any  other 


BUT  THAT  OF   LIFE  OR  CONSCIOUSNESS.  103 

attestation  in  us  than  that  of  consciousness,  which  is 
the  strict  or  true  organ  of  our  nature. 

You,  unless  I  greatly  err,  have  not  been  in  the 
habit  of  viewing  creation  in  this  light  nor  of  assign- 
ing to  consciousness  so  distinctive  and  important  a 
role  in  the  evolution  of  our  nature.  You  have  been 
wont,  that  is,  to  regard  creation  in  its  mere  legendary 
aspect,  as  primarily  a  material  and  objective  work  of 
God,  wrought  within  the  proper  precincts  of  space 
and  time,  and  only  secondarily  or  reflectively  spiritual 
and  subjective,  as  effected  within  the  sphere  of  men's 
affection  and  thought.  And  you  have  been  wont  con- 
sequently to  regard  consciousness  not  as  the  organ  of 
men's  proper  nature,  attesting  only  what  is  unitary 
and  universal  in  their  experience,  but  rather  as  a  mere 
authentication  and  badge  of  their  private  personality, 
attesting  what  is  but  individual  or  trivial  and  differ- 
ential in  their  annals. 

But  these  distinctions  are  obviously  too  large  a 
theme  to  be  approached  at  the  close  of  a  letter ;  and 
we  shall  do  them  more  justice  after  getting  a  little 
more  insight  into  the  philosophy  of  creation  gen- 
erally, and  particularly  into  the  doctrine  of  nature  as 
rigidly  incidental  thereto,  as  in  fact  its  inevitable 
point  d^appui. 


LETTER     XI. 


IFY  DEAR  FRIEND:  — It  is  sometimes 
hotly  contended  among  professing  Chris- 
tians whether  there  be  few  or  many 
saved.  The  gospel  itself  sheds  no  light 
upon  the  dreary  problem  either  way,  and  what  it 
does  say  renders  this  and  every  similar  idle  question 
from  a  human  point  of  view  altogether  superfluous 
and  tiresome.  For  it  testifies  that  a  certain  man 
called  Jesus  the  Christ,  who  was  conceived  and  born 
of  a  virgin  mother  (and  was  therefore  presumably 
free  from  limitation  on  the  psychical  or  paternal 
side)  was  eventually  able  by  the  things  which  he 
suffered  and  did,  to  unite  his  hmnan  nature  to  the 
Godhead,  and  invest  tliat  hitherto  undefined  and 
unknown  force  with  the  perfectly  clear  lineaments  of 
a  glorified  flesh-and-blood  man.  In  face  of  this  testi- 
mony all  our  breathless  theologic  and  scientific  dis- 
putes sink  into  the  insignificant  prattle  of  childhood, 
and  one  wholly  forgets  to  consider  whether  in  fact 


OBJECTION  TO  MIRACLE.  105 

the  number  of  saved  be  absolutely  few  or  many. 
For  if  a  man  be  sure  that  his  nature  is  enlarged  to 
the  compass  of  infinitude,  it  can  signify  very  little 
to  him  what  afterwards  becomes  of  his  veiy  uninter- 
esting person.  To  be  sure  one  cannot  very  wxll 
doubt  that  in  that  case  his  person  will  fare  much 
beyond  its  proper  deserts :  for  if  the  nature  of  man 
become  divinized  it  is  hard  to  see  how  his  person, 
w^hich  is  a  strict  phenomenon  of  his  nature,  can 
escape  reflecting  a  proportionate  enlargement :  but  all 
I  want  to  say  is  that  provided  the  gospel  be  true, 
a  man  can  perfectly  well  aff'ord  to  dismiss  all  anxiety 
upon  the  score  of  his  private  or  personal  fortunes  at 
God's  hands. 

"  Aye,"  you  reply,  ^^ provided  the  gospel  is  true ! 
But  I  have  serious  doubts  of  this.  That  is  to  say, 
I  have  lately  taken  counsel  of  certain  distinguished 
scientific  teachers,  and  they  have  so  discredited  mira- 
cle to  me  as  a  factor  in  human  afi'airs,  that  I  even 
hesitate  to  admit  any  truth  however  little  '  scientific,' 
which  like  that  of  the  gospel  seems  necessarily  to 
involve  it." 

Miracle  no  doubt  is  very  properly  disowned  by 
science  as  a  true  cause  of  phenomena,  because  if  men 
attempt  to  account  for  physical  facts  by  the  allegation 
of  metaphysical  causes,  or  causes  extrinsic  to  the  physi- 
cal realm,  they  must  end  by  denying  physics  an  order 


106  MIRACLE   IS   BAD   SCIENCE, 

of  their  own,  and  so  disqualify  science.  But  because 
miracle  is  disowned  by  science  as  an  answer  to  her 
physical  interrogations,  we  are  not  justified,  nor  ever 
shall  be,  in  excluding  it  from  philosophic  recognition, 
as  in  truth  the  most  efficient  factor  in  the  history  of 
human  nature.  For  philosophy  unlike  science  has  no 
interest  in  physics  as  a  literal  fact,  but  only  as  a  spirit- 
ual symbol,  and  is  no  w^ay  disconcerted  therefore  when 
you  deny  miracle  a  place  and  function  in  physical 
order.  She  has  never  been  disposed  to  assign  it  such 
place  and  function,  but  on  the  contrary  has  expressly 
relegated  it  to  spiritual  or  metaphysical  uses.  No 
man  of  philosophic  genius,  that  is,  no  lover  of  truth 
for  truth's  own  sake,  has  ever  dreamt  of  finding  a 
place  or  function  for  miracle  in  reference  to  physics, 
or  the  fixed  statics  of  the  mind,  and  has  allowed  it  at 
most  in  reference  to  history,  or  its  living  dynamics 
and  outcome.  Every  such  man  unfeignedly  reverences 
miracle  under  this  reserve,  because  in  the  long  spir- 
itual night  of  the  mind  when  all  knowledge  of  Divine 
things  was  obscured  under  the  pall  of  men's  mental 
and  material  penury,  it  alone  shone  as  a  feeble  but 
prophetic  day-star  from  on  high  to  lift  men's  faith 
and  hope  out  of  an  every  way  lifeless  and  ignominious 
present,  and  fix  them  on  a  living  and  radiant  future 
big  with  God's  unimaginable  mercy.  Thus  miracle 
has  always  spoken  to  the  free  or  spontaneous  mind  of 


BUT  VERY  GOOD  PHILOSOPHY.  107 

man,  which  recognizes  in  itself  a  higher  life  than  that 
of  organic  nature,  and  has  always  nurtured  it  to  im- 
mortal issues.  It  has  alone  in  fact  kept  this  mind 
alive  in  men,  when  science,  or  their  servile  inteUi- 
gence,  being  as  absolutely  tethered  to  physics  as 
an  imprisoned  bird  to  its  cage,  would  otherwise 
have  willingly  immersed  it  in  the  mere  mud  of 
sense. 

It  ought  to  be  confessed  moreover  that  science 
has  never  taken  cognizance  but  of  strictly  objective 
facts,  facts  of  man's  physical  or  outside  experience, 
facts,  every  one  of  them,  susceptible  in  a  more  or 
less  subtle  fashion  of  a  sensible  verification.  So 
that  it  is  only  by  breaking  her  own  tether,  the 
tether  that  binds  her  to  existence,  and  leaping  the 
petty  fences  that  shut  her  out  from  the  free  domain 
of  the  human  mind,  that  science  comes  to  know  any- 
thing more  about  facts  of  life  or  consciousness,  facts 
of  man's  interior  or  subjective  experience,  than  a 
blind  mole  knows  of  astronomy.  Yet  these  are  the 
express  data  of  philosophy,  or  things  given  in  her 
very  existence,  without  which  accordingly  she  has  no 
foothold  upon  earth.  For  philosophy  has  but  one 
end,  the  research  of  being,  and  confines  herself  con- 
sequently to  the  only  field  where  she  finds  any 
echo  or  revelation  of  such  being,  namely :  the  field 
of  man's  phenomenal  life  or  consciousness.     Life  or 


108  MIRACLE  IS   BAD  SCIENCE, 

consciousness  unites  what  sense  or  science  divides, 
and  it  is  this  unitary  point  of  knowledge  in  man  that 
philosophy  takes  for  granted  in  all  her  appeals,  while 
she  bestows  a  very  fitful  and  subordinate  glance  at 
the  lifeless  or  divided  testimony  of  sense  or  science. 

Now  science  is  self-excluded  —  excluded,  that  is, 
by  the  necessity  of  self-preservation  —  from  the  re- 
search of  being,  i.  e.,  what  gives  spiritual  or  invisible 
unity  to  things,  and  devotes  herself  instead  to  ascer- 
taining the  constitution  of  existence,  that  is,  to  the 
discovery  of  the  strictly  material  bond  or  tenure  of 
existence  which  this  magnificent  framework  of  na- 
ture exhibits.  In  spite  however  of  these  purist  or 
pedantic  airs  of  science  the  craving  of  man  after 
higher  knowledge  has  been  so  inveterate  as  to  force 
science  herself  upon  the  effort  to  supply  it,  by  for- 
mulating a  strictly  ontological  theory  of  existence, 
making  sense  final  and  absolute,  so  at  all  events 
barring  out  the  conception  of  a  spiritual  creation, 
vyith  all  the  ghostly  interests  and  imaginations  inci- 
dent thereto.  This  is  a  clever  dodge,  for  although 
it  is  no  more  warranted  by  science  than  by  philos- 
ophy, it  still  enables  the  scientific  man  by  winking 
hard  to  exclude  from  his  mental  horizon  a  vast  array 
of  intrusive  questions  of  exceeding  interest  to  the 
average  mind,  which  yet  bring  nothing  but  per- 
plexity and   dismay  to   a  wilfully  narrower   intelli- 


BUT  VERY  GOOD  PHILOSOPHY.        109 

gence.  No  one  of  a  philosophic  turn  of  mind,  I 
am  persuaded,  grudges  science  any  temporary  relief 
it  secures  to  itself  in  this  crafty  way;  but  when 
scientific  men,  not  content  with  this  good-humored 
concession,  attempt  disingenuously  to  foist  in  upon 
other  minds  those  purely  negative  and  authoritative 
conclusions  of  theirs,  they  should  be  made  clearly  to 
understand  that  they  are  guilty  of  a  very  impudent 
interference  with  human  freedom.  An  ontologic  or 
absolute  scheme  of  universal  existence  may  be  freely- 
tolerated  to  them  personally,  as  summarily  saving 
them  much  precious  time  which  they  would  devote 
to  minor  pursuits.  But  it  is  nothing  short  of  lu- 
dicrous to  suppose  that  the  great  unsophisticated 
spiritual  instincts  of  mankind  are  ever  going  to 
acquiesce  in  any  such  piddling  scheme  of  things, 
did  it  even  claim  to  its  support  all  and  sundry  the 
cumbrous  personnel  of  science  fifty  times  multiplied. 
For  my  own  part  I  laugh  to  utter  scorn  this  sottish 
and  grovelling  notion  of  an  ontologic  basis  to  exist- 
ence, and  hold  the  dicta  of  any  of  our  more  flagrant 
scientific  popes  thereupon  to  be  quite  as  contempt- 
ible rationally,  and  not  near  so  honest  morally,  as 
those  of  their  deposed  and  degraded  ecclesiastical 
rivals.  The  first  duty  of  a  scientific  teacher  is  to 
bring  definite  conceptions  before  the  mind ;  and 
what  has  a  spurious  theology  to  offer  more  stupid 


110  MIRACLE  IS  BAD  SCIENCE, 

and  depraved  intellectuably  than  this  ontologic  expli- 
cation of  creation,  wherein  existence  frankly  confesses 
to  constituting  her  own  absolute  being,  and  the  cart 
meekly  acknowledges  its  long  misunderstood  duty  of 
drawing  the  horse. 

"Now  iu  the  uame  of  all  the  gods  at  ouce. 
Upon  what  meat  doth  this  our  'science'  feed. 
That  she  is  grown  so  great" 

as  to  convert  the  abject  limitations  of  her  own  ser- 
vile intelligence  into  a  law  of  the  human  mind,  or 
sink  heaven-born  wisdom  itself  into  a  mere  synonym 
of  learning  ?  It  seems  in  fact  to  be  a  modern 
instance  of  ^sop's  fabulous  old  fox,  who  was  so 
annoyed  by  an  accident  to  his  hinder  dimensions 
which  compelled  him  always  to  maintain  a  sitting 
posture,  that  he  found  thenceforth  no  solace  in  life 
but  in  persuading  his  brethren  to  undergo  a  like 
physical  mutilation. 

It  strikes  me  then  that  the  cavil  you  urge  against 
the  Christian  truth,  as  involving  a  miraculous  basis, 
is  simply  captious,  or  disowns  even  a  scientific  war- 
rant, let  alone  a  philosophic  one.  For  the  only  ob- 
jection which  science  (short  of  self-stultification)  can 
offer  to  miracle  is,  when  it  is  postulated  as  a  physical 
cause.  And  the  miracle  in  question,  which  is  the 
birth  of  Christ  from  a  virgin,  so  far  from  being 
adduced  to  characterize  any  fact  whatever  of  physical 


BUT  VERY  GOOD  PHILOSOPHY.  HI 

genesis  or  order,  expressly  confines  itself  to  signaliz- 
ing a  new  beginning  of  human  history,  that  is,  a 
fact  exclusively  of  metaphysical  genesis  or  spiritual 
order.  Science  to  be  sure  may  deny  if  she  pleases 
that  there  is  any  metaphysical  genesis  to  human  his- 
tory, or  that  physical  fact  is  a  mere  witness  to  the 
activity  of  spiritual  order :  but  we  are  no  way  bound 
to  listen  to  her.  She  may  in  short  deny  any  dis- 
crete difference  between  physics  and  history,  or  run 
the  mind  of  man  into  his  own  entrails ;  but  she  does 
so  only  at  the  risk  of  degrading  her  utterances  to  the 
level  of  a  goose's  cackle,  and  disqualifying  herself  for 
men's  respect. 

—  But  now  after  all  let  me  say  that  I  really  stand 
in  a  much  more  free  and  uncommitted  relation  to 
miracle  than  you  do,  or  any  mere  scientific  dogmatist. 
For  while  you  are  vehemently  impelled  to  reject  both 
its  actual  and  its  possible  truth,  I  value  it  as  an 
unquestionable  race-tradition  simply,  or  deliverance  of 
the  common  mind,  and  am  as  little  concerned  there- 
fore about  its  literal  truth  or  falsity  in  a  scientific 
point  of  view,  as  I  am  about  the  truth  or  falsity  of  the 
multiplication  table,  which  I  learned  by  heart  in  my 
uncritical  infancy,  and  the  truth  of  which  I  have  never 
challenged  nor  suspected  since.  Were  I  indeed  as 
wise  as  Sir  Isaac  Newton  I  should  not  know  how 
to  set  about  increasing  my  faith  in  it;    or  as  acute 


112  MY  OWN   INTELLECTUAL 

as  Professor  Huxley,  I  should  be  at  an  utter  loss  to 
imagine  the  means  of  weakening  it.  For  it  lies  en- 
tirely back  of  my  intellect,  being  in  fact  and  in  part 
its  indispensable  mother 's-milk,  or  constituting  that 
basis  of  fixed  or  positive  knowledge  which  is  requi- 
site to  give  my  intellect  hodij ;  so  that  to  argue  with 
me  about  its  truth  or  falsity  is  to  destroy  my  mental 
personality,  or  at  the  least  put  its  foundations  in  doubt, 
and  leave  me  consequently  at  most  a  mere  reasoning 
or  gabbling  idiot.  It  is  one  of  those  rich  gratuitous 
gifts  of  my  race-intelligence  to  me  which  are  neces- 
sary to  constitute  my  own  intellect,  or  endow  me 
consciously  for  my  subsequent  intellectual  unity  and 
fellowship  with  mankind.  And  to  attribute  to  me 
therefore  a  shadow  of  ability  to  turn  round  upon  it 
and  scrutinize  it  with  a  view  either  to  my  private 
acceptance  or  rejection  of  it,  is  in  my  opinion  flatly 
to  deny  my  sheer  intellectual  dependence  upon  my 
race. 

Just  so  with  this  beneficent  race-tradition  of  mira- 
cle :  it  quite  antedates  men's  turbid  scientific  judg- 
ments of  Divine  things,  and  constitutes  a  revelation 
to  their  devout  believing  hearts  of  the  truth  of  God's 
sole  spiritual  existence  and  activity  in  the  realm  of 
man's  nature  and  history,  long  before  their  intellect 
is  educated  to  discern  it.  In  the  infancy  of  the  race, 
as  in  that  of  the  individual,  the  heart  in  its  worship- 


ATTITUDE  TOWARDS  MIRACLE.  113 

ping  innocency  is  far  more  impressible  to  the  Divine 
presence  in  nature  than  the  understanding ;  and  often 
as  in  the  case  before  us  accepts  a  truth  which  the 
slower  and  more  timorous  intellect  takes  centuries 
to  interpret.  Especially  at  that  early  day  there  was 
no  such  thing  possible  as  a  scientific  judgment  of  the 
mind  upon  the  pretension  of  Jesus  Christ  to  constitute 
a  final  revelation  of  the  creative  name  in  humanity. 
Nor,  if  there  had  been,  do  I  suppose  that  the  great 
bulk  of  mankind  would  have  been  less  obdurately 
indifferent  to  it,  than  they  are  to  similar  judgments 
in  our  own  day.  For,  remember,  that  the  pretension 
of  Jesus  Christ  imported  no  such  transparent  quack- 
ery as  a  reform  in  men's  moral  relations :  for  a  mere 
moral  reform  of  mankind  could  not  be  effected  of 
course  save  with  the  privity  and  concurrence  of  every 
one  interested  in  the  result :  but  was  tantamount  to 
the  spiritual  recreation  or  renewing  of  their  common 
nature,  and  appealed  therefore  for  its  truth  to  the 
competency  of  no  individual  judgment,  but  to  tlie 
verdict  of  the  great  race  or  nature  itself,  when  its 
personality  should  be  definitely  constituted.  Espe- 
cially was  the  gospel  clear  of  tolerating,  much  more  of 
inviting,  any  ratification  at  the  hands  of  the  philoso- 
pher, or  the  scientific  man,  or  the  religious  man,  «.s 
such,  but  at  most  it  summoned  to  its  ranks  every 
bruised   and   tattered  outcast  of  humanity,  through 


114  MY   OWN   INTELLECTUAL 

whose  dilapidated  private  personality  the  great  race- 
consciousness  of  mankind  might  vindicate  its  sole 
and  sovereign  truth.  Thus  these  precious  facts  of 
revelation,  whether  they  fall  within  the  sphere  of  my 
understanding  or  my  affections,  quite  transcend  the 
grasp  of  my  critical  faculty,  and  impose  themselves 
upon  my  heart  as  an  unmixed  good,  which  I  am  just 
as  incapable  of  measuring  in  terms  of  the  analytic 
intellect,  or  reducing  to  the  contrast  of  the  true  and 
the  false,  as  I  am  of  demonstrating  to  a  blind  man  the 
pleasure  of  a  gorgeous  sunset,  or  reasoning  a  man 
without  a  palate  into  the  savor  of  sugar. 

Doubtless  it  is  not  important,  dear  friend,  that 
every  specific  atom  of  the  human  race  should  in  his 
own  history  vividly  reflect  this  superiority  of  the 
sacred  and  tender  heart  to  the  comparatively  com- 
monplace and  misleading  intellect;  because  the  for- 
tunes of  no  individual  mind  are  of  much  account  in 
the  development  of  our  natural  history.  But  it  is 
vitally  important  to  the  race's  integral  evolution  that 
this  hierarchical  supremacy  of  heart  to  head  should 
be  clearly  acknowledged  and  maintained.  For  our 
race-evolution  constitutes  the  distinctive  and  exclusive 
line  of  Divine  revelation,  and  we,  blind  and  selfish 
egotists  that  we  are,  should  be  little  enlightened  by 
a  revelation  that  gave  truth  the  supremacy  of  good 
in  human  life.     Hence  the  value  to  the  human  mind 


ATTITUDE  TOWARDS  MIRACLE.  115 

of  the  race's  unreasoned  traditions,  for  they  alone 
through  the  utter  darkness,  and  in  a  crude  but 
effectual  way,  have  kept  alive  the  faith  of  men  in 
God's  unbroken  spiritual  providence  and  government. 
We  at  this  late  day,  who  have  lost  the  interior  or 
spiritual  perception  of  Divine  truth,  cannot  help  to 
be  sure  cavilling  at  the  credulity  of  earlier  ages,  and 
insisting  for  our  own  part  that  we  shall  believe  only 
what  is  level  to  our  senses.  AYe  have  an  unques- 
tionable Divine  right  thus  to  cheapen  truth  if  we 
like ;  but  we  must  bear  the  inevitable  penalty :  which 
takes  place  in  a  like  unquestionable  cheapening  or 
lowering  of  our  faculty  of  spiritual  insight.  I  for 
one  am  not  aware  of  being  able  to  exert  the  least 
voluntary  or  personal  control  over  the  things  of  my 
religious  life.  For  religion  above  all  things  is  what 
identifies  me  consciously  with  the  life  of  my  kind ; 
and  I  should  accordingly  feel  it  nothing  short  of 
sacrilege  to  attempt  legislating  for  myself  in  a  matter 
where  the  race  alone  was  competent.  Least  of  all 
should  my  scientific  conscience  empower  me  so  to  do ; 
for  inasmuch  as  my  scientific  conscience  is  my  sole 
legitimate  citadel  and  armory  of  self-defence  against 
unauthorized  aggression,  I  can  never  have  occasion 
to  appeal  to  it  against  my  race,  whence  alone  comes  all 
my  intellectual  nutriment  and  succor,  but  only  against 
chance  individual  dogmatism  and  false  pretension. 


116  MY  OWN  mTELLECTUAL 

Understand  me  then :  I  do  not  care  a  fig  whether 
any  of  the  incidental  facts  or  even  the  total  scope 
of  Divine  revelation,  be  regarded  as  a  literal  verity  or 
not.  For  if  so  they  contravene  no  scientific  fact,  or 
fact  of  physical  order,  because  they  profess  on  their 
face  to  be  facts  of  a  spiritual  or  metaphysical  order, 
and  therefore  leave  every  ordinary  fact  as  well  as  the 
total  course  of  nature  uncontradicted  and  unimpaired. 
And  if  they  are  without  literal  truth  they  yet  claim 
an  infinitely  higher  —  which  is  a  living  or  spiritual 
—  truth,  affirmed  by  consciousness  alone.  They  are 
a  truth  in  other  words  of  man's  vital  or  associated 
consciousness,  and  science  is  entirely  unqualified  either 
to  affirm  or  deny  it.  Science  has  no  power  to  pene- 
trate the  living  consciousness  of  man ;  because  her 
observation  invariably  restricts  itself  to  phenomena 
capable  in  the  last  resort  of  being  sensibly  appre- 
hended, or  reporting  themselves  to  other  persons  than 
the  proper  subject  of  them.  Her  activity  is  limited 
to  the  deceased  or  reflective  consciousness,  to  con- 
sciousness considered  as  a  spent  force,  in  short,  but 
leaving  some  footprints  of  its  former  life  on  the  lower 
sands  of  sense.  Unless  therefore  we  are  fully  pre- 
pared to  accept  Comte's  judgment  of  science,  and 
look  upon  it  not  as  an  essentially  servile  sphere  of 
the  mind,  which  it  is,  but  as  the  end  or  final  cause 
of  all  its  precedent  stages  of  progress,  we  may  dis- 


ATTITUDE  TOWARDS  MIRACLE.  117 

miss  it  from  oar  further  regard  as  having  any  legiti- 
mate title  either  to  revise  or  reorganize  our  past 
historic  evolution,  or  predict  that  which  is  still  future. 
I  doubt  not  there  are  as  many  foolish  scientific  men, 
in  proportion  to  the  whole  number  of  the  adherents 
of  science,  as  there  are  foolish  religious  men.  And 
we  must  expect  all  such  accordingly,  under  the 
prompting  of  a  silly  ambition  or  covetousness,  now 
and  then  to  transgress  their  own  territorial  limits, 
and  sit  in  presumptuous  judgment  on  the  concerns 
of  their  neighbors.  Their  religious  neighbor  at  least 
has  no  call  to  complain  of  this,  for  he  himself  has 
long  set  the  vicious  example.  But  the  one  pretension 
is  just  as  disorderly  as  the  other,  and  I  think  that  the 
better  class  of  scientific  men,  who  have  no  mercenary 
aims,  are  perfectly  persuaded  of  this. 

But  a  truce  to  this  polemic.  Science  has  to  do 
only  with  specific  facts,  or  experiences  of  sense,  ignor- 
ing universals  or  experiences  of  the  mind ;  and  she 
has  a  perfect  right  therefore,  indeed  it  is  her  proper 
business,  to  ontologize  on  a  physical  basis,  or  account 
for  species  upon  rigid  time  and  space  principles.  But 
existence  is  spiritual  before  it  is  material ;  belongs  to 
the  mind  before  it  comes  down  to  the  senses ;  is  uni- 
versal or  dynamical  before  it  is  specific  or  fixed ;  and 
Philosophy  accordingly,  which  is  the  science  of  Man, 
and  deals  directly  therefore  only  with  mental  expe- 


118  INFIKMITY  OF  THE  CKITICAL 

riences,  has  an  equal  and  indeed  prior  right  to  take 
up  these  logical  universals,  these  dynamics  of  the 
mind,  and  account  for  them  on  strictly  metaphysical 
—  that  is  to  say,  spiritual  —  principles. 

And  now  let  us  get  back  to  our  starting-point, 
which  is  the  conception  Swedenborg  entertains  of 
creation.  But  before  proceeding  directly  to  canvass 
his  ideas  upon  that  subject,  and  as  apropos  to  the 
attitude  of  the  purely  scientific  mind,  I  desire  to 
quote  you  a  few  pages  of  criticism  from  his  books, 
bearing  on  the  great  disadvantages  which  result  to  the 
intellect  from  wantonly  rejecting  the  race-continuity, 
or  violently  disallowing  the  absoluteness  of  knowledge 
in  its  own  sphere. 

"  I  will  show  you  briefly,"  he  says,  "  what  the 
difference  practically  amounts  to,  between  an  inclina- 
tion to  truth  and  an  inclination  to  good.  Those  who 
are  inclined  to  truth  primarily  stick  in  the  letter  of 
things,  or  inquire  among  themselves  whether  the  thing 
affirmed  really  exist  or  not,  and  whether  or  not  it 
exist  thus  and  so;  and  only  when  they  have  aired 
their  doubts  sufficiently  as  to  these  preliminary  mat- 
ters, are  they  prepared  to  take  up  and  discuss  the 
character  of  the  actual  thing  itself.  Thus  they  plant 
themselves  obstinately  upon  the  threshold  of  the  tem- 
ple of  wisdom,  and  refuse  to  enter  in  until  all  their 
habitual  doubts  have  been  dealt  with  and  overcome. 


OR  SCEPTICAL  UNDERSTANDING.  119 

"  On  the  other  hand  those  who  are  primarily  well- 
afFected  towards  good,  and  have  no  regard  for  truth 
but  as  its  minister  or  servant,  have  no  perplexity  in  re- 
gard to  the  existence  of  things,  but  know  and  perceive 
them  to  exist  not  by  virtue  of  their  racionative  intel- 
lect, but  by  virtue  of  the  affirmative  power  of  good 
in  their  heart;  and  thus  they  dwell  not  upon  the 
threshold  but  in  the  inner  chambers  of  the  temple. 
Suppose  some  one  to  say  for  example  that  it  is  true 
wisdom  to  love  your  neighhor  not  for  his  own  sake, 
but  for  the  sake  of  the  good  manifest  in  him.  Those 
who  are  in  the  first  instance  in  the  affection  of  truth, 
that  is,  in  a  critical  or  sceptical  state  of  mind,  begin 
at  once  to  speculate  whether  or  not  the  proposition 
be  true,  and  then  stop ;  while  those  who  are  in  an 
affirmative  state  of  mind,  as  loving  good  first  and 
truth  subordinately,  admit  the  proposition  at  once, 
and  discern,  by  virtue  of  the  good  they  are  in,  who 
is  most  truly  the  neighbor,  and  in  what  degree  he  is 
such,  and  that  all  men  are  neighbors  in  different  de- 
grees. In  fact  these  latter  perceive  ineffable  things 
in  truth,  while  the  former  admitting  no  higher  inspi- 
ration than  truth  itself,  discern  comparatively  nothing. 
So  also  in  regard  to  this  allied  truth :  that  he  who 
loves  his  neighbor  for  the  good  attaching  to  him,  loves  the 
Lord:  they  who  value  truth  more  than  good  speculate 
whether  such  be  the  actual  fact  of  the  case  or  not. 


120  INFIRMITY  OF  THE  CRITICAL 

And  if  they  are  told  that  it  must  be  so,  because  he 
who  loves  good  in  the  neighbor  more  than  the  neigh- 
bor himself,  loves  good  itself  (which  good  itself  the 
Lord  alone  is)  and  therefore  loves  the  Lord :  they 
again  begin  to  speculate  whether  it  is  really  so,  and 
what  good  is,  and  whether  good  he  really  more  divine 
than  truth,  and  all  the  rest  of  it ;  and  so  long  as  they 
stick  to  such  speculations,  they  do  not  catch  even  the 
most  remote  glimpse  of  wisdom.* 

"  It  is  notorious  that  much  of  our  disputative  skill 
at  this  day  goes  no  further  than  to  put  the  existence 
of  things  in  doubt.  But  as  long  as  this  habit  con- 
tinues, and  men  are  content  to  debate  whether  things 
be  or  not,  and  whether  they  he  as  alleged  or  not,  it  is 
impossible  to  make  any  progress  in  wisdom.  For 
wisdom  grows  and  thrives  only  upon  the  numberless 
particulars  which  are  embraced  in  the  thing  whose 
existence  is  put  in  doubt ;  and  as  long  as  this  scep- 
ticism on  the  main  point,  or  as  to  the  certainty  of 
knowledge,  endures,  all  these  particulars  must  remain 
unknown  and  inoperative.  Our  current  erudition  is 
almost  wholly  taken  up  in  inquiring  whether  things 
exist  or  not,  or  whether  they  exist  in  such  or  such  a 
manner,  and  the  consequence  is  that  it  has  no  intelli- 
gence of  truth.  It  is  surprising  how  wise  people  of 
this  sort  conceive  themselves  to  be  in  comparison  with 

*  Arcana   Celestia,  2718. 


OR  SCEPTICAL  UNDERSTANDING.  121 

others ;  and  how  they  measure  their  wisdom  by  their 
skill  in  argument,  and  especially  by  their  ability  to 
determine  it  to  negative  conclusions.  But  men  of 
simple  good  hearts,  whom  these  high-flyers  despise, 
perceive  at  a  glance,  without  debate  or  learned 
controversy,  both  the  existence  of  the  thing  put  in 
doubt,  and  also  its  quality.  These  unsophisticated 
people  possess  that  common-sense  perception  of  truth, 
which  the  former  have  extinguished  in  themselves 
by  their  inveterate  habit  of  growing  disputatious 
about  the  foundations  of  knowledge,  or  the  existence 
of  truth.* 

"  I  have  sometimes  spoken  with  angels  about  heav- 
enly dwelling-houses,  and  said  to  them  that  hardly 
any  one  upon  earth  believes  that  angels  have  need  of 
such  accommodation ;  some  because  they  have  no 
sensible  proof  of  the  fact ;  others  because  they  do  not 
know  that  angels  are  men ;  others  still  because  they 
believe  that  the  angelic  heaven  is  the  visible  vault 
overhead  ;  and  inasmuch  as  this  vault  appears  empty, 
and  they  suppose  angels  to  be  ethereal  creatures,  they 
conclude  that  angels  live  in  the  ether.  Besides,  as 
they  are  ignorant  of  everything  spiritual,  they  have 
no  conception  how  such  things  can  exist  in  the  spirit- 
ual world  as  exist  in  the  natural.  The  angels  replied 
that  this  Avas  no  news  to  them,  but  that  it  was  never- 

*  Arcana  Celestia,  3428. 


122  INFIRMITY  OF  THE  CRITICAL 

theless  matter  of  surprise  to  thein  that  such  ignorance 
existed  chiefly  in  the  church,  and  rather  among 
the  intelligent  than  among  those  whom  these  latter 
call  the  simple.  They  replied  moreover  that  if  these 
ignorant  churchmen  would  only  take  the  testimony 
of  the  Scriptures  they  profess  to  follow  on  the  sub- 
ject, they  would  see  that  angels  were  only  human 
beings,  and  as  such  requiring  houses ;  and  that  al- 
though they  are  spiritual  men  they  are  not  therefore 
mere  ethereal  forms  as  some  people  ignorantly  and 
insanely  suppose.  They  thought  moreover  that  men 
would  think  of  angels  truly  if  they  would,  obey  the 
dictate  of  common  sense,  which  flows  in  from  heaven 
and  tells  us  that  angels  are  human  beings ;  but  the 
moment  they  put  this  inward  impression  in  doubt, 
and  take  to  speculating  first  tohether  the  fact  reallf/ 
be  so,  they  annihilate  the  influx  which  has  no  longer 
anything  to  fall  into.  This  occurs  among  the  learned 
mainly  who  by  leaning  unduly  to  their  own  under- 
standing, shut  out  heaven  from  themselves,  and  the 
approach  of  light  thence.  So  also  every  one  instinct- 
ively believes  in  immortal  life,  and  when  he  does  not 
think  of  the  subject  from  what  learned  men  have  had 
to  say  about  it,  has  no  difficulty  in  believing ;  but 
when  he  reverts  to  learned  hypotheses  concerning 
the  soul  and  the  doctrine  of  the  body's  reunion 
with  it,  and  asks  of  himself  whether  immortal  life  he 


OR  SCEPTICAL  UNDERSTANDING.  123 

really  true  or  not,  of  course  his  instinctive  belief  is 
dissipated."  * 

—  I  have  cited  these  pregnant  passages  not  so 
much  for  their  own  sake,  as  exemplifying  the  ex- 
quisite inwardness  so  to  speak  of  Swedenborg's 
thought  —  the  infinite  delicacy  and  devoutness  of 
mind  which  were  habitual  to  him  —  as  with  a  view 
to  illustrate  how  profoundly  dissident  his  intellectual 
method  is  with  the  whole  scope  of  our  modern  scien- 
tific research.  Happily  for  us  the  ontological  ques- 
tions which  occupy  our  current  scientific  speculation 
—  questions  as  to  whether  "  things  are  or  are  not," 
which  result  for  the  most  part  in  a  negative  convic- 
tion, as  that  everything  runs  into  everything  else  with 
such  good-will  that  at  bottom  all  things  are  identical, 
with  only  an  evanescent  individuality  or  difierence 
attaching  to  anything — did  not  occupy  him,  and  we 
have  consequently  one  positive  intellect  surviving  — 
and  long  destined  to  survive,  as  I  think  —  the  craziest 
revolutions  of  our  modern  thought.  The  reason  why 
these  ontological  temptations  did  not  assail  him,  nor 
in  any  wise  bewitch  or  bedevil  his  clear  understand- 
ing, is  that  he  viewed  creation  as  exclusively  a  func- 
tion of  the  Divine  life,  and  hence  looked  upon  nature 
as  a  covert  spiritual  dynamics,  or  sheer  involution  of 
the  spiritual  world,  not  only  requiring  no  being  in 

*  Be  C(clo  et  Inferno,  183. 


124  SWEDENBOEG  AN  OUT-AND-OUT  REALIST. 

itself,  but  actually  abjuring  it  as  the  right  exclusively 
of  a  higher  power.  Thus  he  had  no  shred  of  a 
tendency  to  Idealism,  but  was  a  realist  of  the  first 
water,  a  realist  of  absolutely  no  nuance  whatever,  hav- 
ing just  as  unfeigned  a  reverence  for  the  senses  in 
their  sphere  as  for  the  soul  in  its  sphere,  and  prac- 
tically therefore  just  as  incapable  of  confounding  the 
two  spheres  as  any  carman  you  may  meet  upon  the 
street. 


LETTER     XII. 


DEAR  FRIEND  :  —  Creation  with 
Swedenborg  is  the  alpha  and  the  omega 
yHHH  °^  Philosophy.  But  then  be  very  sure  to 
understand  that  the  creation  he  thus  re- 
gards as  the  fundamental  postulate  of  philosophy  is 
not  the  least  a  mechanical  exhibition  of  Divine  power, 
consisting  in  giving  the  creature  finite  or  phenomenal 
existence,  but,  on  the  contrary,  an  altogether  living  or 
spiritual  achievement,  wherebi/  God  communicates  Him- 
self to  the  creature,  in  tJie  j^lenitiide  of  His  infinite  and 
eternal  being.  He  views  creation  as  a  spontaneous 
work  of  God,  that  is,  a  work  of  delight;  because  God, 
being  infinite  love  —  which  means  love  without  any 
drawback  or  limitation  of  5c^-love  —  lives  only  by 
communicating  Himself  to  whatsoever  is  not  Himself. 
And  men  commonly,  you  know,  conceive  of  creation 
as  a  voluntary  work  of  God,  effected  in  time  and 
space,  whereby   He  makes   all   things   out   of  stark 


126  CREATION  A  SPONTANEOUS  WORK. 

nought,  and  which  therefore  He  might,  had  it  so 
pleased  Him,  have  altogether  forborne  to  accomplish. 
Svvedenborg  then  stamps  this  conception  of  creative 
power  as  utterly  sensuous  and  puerile,  inasmuch  as 
space  and  time  with  all  their  contents  possess  no 
reality  save  to  an  infirm  or  imperfect  intelligence. 
There  never  was  a  space,  according  to  him,  where 
creation  w^as  not,  nor  a  time  when  it  was  not.  In 
other  words,  space  and  time  fall  exclusively  ivith'm 
the  created  intelligence,  and  constitute  the  broadest 
or  most  common  form  of  the  natural  mind.  There  is 
no  such  thin^,  that  is,  no  such  objective  existence,  as 
space  or  time,  save  to  our  sensuous  judgment.  AVe, 
by  nature,  are  densely  ignorant  of  the  spiritual  links 
that  bind  the  universe  of  existence  together,  and  our 
flickering  reason,  following  the  dictate  of  sense,  sub- 
stitutes for  these  the  obvious  liaisons  of  space  and 
time.  Thus  they  are  both  of  them  mere  terms  of 
relation  supplied  by  our  infirm  intelligence  between 
the  various  objects  of  our  senses,  and  the  various  events 
of  history.  They  constitute  a  mental  background,  as 
I  have  said,  the  one  to  our  perception  of  existence, 
the  other  to  our  perception  of  life ;  the  one  being 
fundamental  to  our  conception  of  things,  the  other  to 
our  conception  of  events.  They  neither  of  them  have 
any  positive  force,  space  signifying  nothing  but  the 
absence  to  our  perception  of  limitation  (or  the  finite). 


NATURE  UNREAL  AND  IMPERSONAL.  127 

and   time   the   absence  of  eventuality  (or   the  rela- 
tive).* 

But  if  space  and  time  bear  no  semblance  of  reality 
to  creative  thought,  and  possess  at  best  but  a  bare 
semblance  of  it  even  to  man's  spiritual  intelligence, 
then  of  course  we  must  expect  Swedenborg  to  deny 
all  reality  to  Nature,  for  nature  is  conditioned  in  space 
and  time,  being  the  sum  total  of  the  hmitations  of 
the  one  and  the  vicissitudes  of  the  other.    And  this  is 

*  In  fact,  they  are  negative  -witnesses  to  the  mind  of  the  infinity  and 
eternity  which  are  alone  competent  to  the  explanation  of  existence. 
Space,  whenever  I  affirm  it,  and  in  so  far  forth  as  it  is  affirmed,  means, 
neither  more  nor  less,  the  absence  to  my  perception  of  sensible  limita- 
tion, and  time  the  absence  of  eventuality.  Thus  the  space  of  a  mile 
upon  the  earth's  surface  is  an  explicit  denial  within  that  interval  of  any 
limitation,  and  to  that  extent  of  course  an  implicit  affirmation  of  the  in- 
finitude which  subtends  all  existence.  And  the  time  of  an  hour  or  a 
day  or  a  year  of  the  earth's  history  means  the  denial  within  that  interval 
of  any  eventuality  to  my  perception,  and  hence  an  affirmation  by  impli- 
cation of  the  eternity  which  subtends  all  our  experience.  In  short, 
space,  being  the  logical  background  of  existence  to  our  perception  — 
being  the  necessary  fidcrum  or  purchase  which  our  intelligence  exacts 
in  order  to  its  discernment  of  finite  existence  —  must  needs  constitute  a 
negative  or  inverse  attestation  to  the  essential  infinitude  which  underlies 
all  the  phenomena  of  nature,  simply  because  there  is  no  logical  negation 
of  infinitude  but  sensible  limitation.  And  time,  being  in  like  manner 
only  the  logical  background  of  eventuality  to  our  perception  —  being 
the  necessary  shadow  exacted  by  our  imperfect  intelligence  in  order  to 
its  discernment  of  relative  existence — is  an  inverse  or  negative  remem- 
brancer of  the  essential  eternity  which  underlies  and  animates  all  the 
phenomena  of  history. 


128  NATURE  UNREAL  AND   IMPERSONAL. 

what  in  truth  he  actually  does.  He  systematically 
denies  a  natural  creation,  and  limits  the  creative  ac- 
tivity in  nature  to  a  purely  redemptive  significance  and 
efficacy.  Thus  nature  has  no  existence  to  Sweden- 
borg  but  what  is  conferred  upon  it  by  our  most  obscure 
and  unveracious  inteUigence  in  spiritual  or  Divine 
things.  It  is  but  the  dense  mask  which  the  spiritual 
creation  puts  on  to  the  sensuous  intelligence,  the  under- 
standing limited  and  dominated  by  sense.  There  is 
no  such  entity  or  thing  as  natiu-e  to  the  spiritual  appre- 
hension ;  for  to  that  apprehension  the  mental  generali- 
zation to  which  we  give  the  name  of  nature  and  thence 
postulate  as  real,  is  merely  a  sign  of  our  crude  inade- 
quate thought,  and  implies  nought  beyond  that.  The 
various  forms  of  our  sensible  experience,  mineral, 
vegetable,  and  animal,  exist  to  the  spiritual  intelli- 
gence much  more  vividly  than  to  ours,  but  the  mental 
attribution  which  we  make  of  all  these  forms  to  some 
unitary  or  universal  substance  called  Nature,  it  utterly 
refuses  to  make,  because  the  only  unitary  or  universal 
substance  it  recognizes  as  underlying  nature's  forms, 
is  not  nature  but  Man.  In  fact,  our  term  Nature  ex- 
presses only  the  indolent  mental  judgment  which  we 
in  our  ignorance  of  spiritual  laws  instinctively  frame 
to  account  for  the  origin  of  existence.  We  have  an 
intuitive  apprehension  of  the  generic  or  universal  iden- 
tity which  underlies  and  binds  together  the  objects 


NATURE  UNREAL  AND   IMPERSONAL.  129 

of  our  senses,  notwithstanding  their  specific  diversity ; 
but  we  are  intellectually  incompetent  to  refer  this 
identity  to  its  true  source,  which  is  the  human  mind, 
and  postulate  for  it  meanwhile  the  supposititious  sub- 
stance which  we  term  Nature,  and  which  means  noth- 
ing more  after  all  than  the  mental  sum  or  aggregate 
of  our  impressions  of  space  and  time.  Everything 
embraced  in  sense  exists  in  a  particular  place  and  at 
a  particular  time,  and  by  abstracting  these  particulars, 
or  universalizing  their  contents,  we  fancy  ourselves 
arrived  at  a  most  real  or  objective  existence,  instead 
of  a  purely  apparitional  or  subjective  one,  and  un- 
hesitatingly name  it  Nature,  venerable  mother  of  all 
living. 

We  cannot,  then,  dear  friend,  too  clearly  make  up 
our  minds  that  Nature  does  not  exist  in  herself,  or 
absolutely,  but  only  as  an  hallucination  of  our  rudi- 
mentary intelligence.  Divinely  permitted,  and  indeed 
engineered,  in  the  interest  of  our  eventual  spiritual 
sanity.  What  we  call  by  the  familiar  name  of  Na- 
ture, and  find  our  chief  imaginative  activity  in  personi- 
fying,  is  not  so  much  as  a  thing  even,  but  all  simply 
a  most  strict  process  or  functioning  of  the  Divine  love 
and  wisdom  towards  our  spiritual  manhood.  It  is 
nothing  more  nor  less  than  the  living  method  which 
the  creative  energy  adopts  in  order  to  spiritual  pro- 
lification.     Spiritual  existence,  you  know,  cannot  be 


130  IT   IS  A  FUNCTIONING  OF  DIVINE  LOVE 

directly  propagated.  The  bare  conception  of  such  a 
thing  is  nugatory,  since  the  existence  so  propagated 
would  be  without  natural  or  conscious  projection  from 
its  creative  source;  while  the  fundamental  postulate 
of  spiritual  existence  is  that  it  be  both  conscious  and 
spontaneous.  But  it  can  be  propagated  indirectly : 
i.  e.  by  the  ministry  of  what  we  call  Nature ;  for  na- 
ture has  a  quasi  existence  or  selfhood  to  oiu*  intelli- 
gence, upon  which  the  Divine  may  subsequently  and 
to  any  extent  mould  His  own  more  real  and  perfect 
communication.  Omne  vivum  ex  ovo.  That  is  to 
say,  there  is  no  form  possible  to  our  apprehension 
without  its  appropriate  substance;  nothing  exists  to 
our  understanding  except  from  some  previous  ground 
of  existence.  No  farmer  expects  next  year's  crop 
unless  he  sow  this  year's  wheat.  No  man  can  become 
a  father  without  the  mediation  of  a  wife.  Could  the 
father  beget  offspring,  and  the  farmer  produce  a  crop 
directly  from  themselves,  the  product  in  both  cases 
would  manifestly  be  visionary,  since  there  could  be 
no  basis  of  discrimination  in  either  case  between  prod- 
uct and  producer.  In  like  manner  precisely  the  archi- 
tect of  the  spiritual  creation  accomplishes  His  work, 
not  by  the  exhibition  of  magical  or  irrational  power, 
not  by  any  idle  and  pompous  incantation  addressed 
to  empty  air,  but  solely  by  the  inward  fecundation  of 
natural  germs  existing  in  our  sensuous  intelligence,  and 


TOWARDS  OUR  SPIRITUAL  MANHOOD.  131 

the  consequent   development  of  a  spiritual   progeny 
every  way  commensurate  with  His  own  perfection. 

• —  Anyhow,  right  or  wrong,  the  fact  is  precisely 
what  I  have  stated:  Swedenborg  makes  nature  the 
realm  of  uncreation :  and  by  that  unexpected  word 
sends  a  breath  of  health  to  the  deepest  heart  of  hell. 
It  is  what  neither  is  nor  exists  in  itself,  but  only  seems 
to  be  and  exist  to  a  subject  intelligence.  But  its  use 
as  such  seeming  is  incomparably  great.  For  it  edu- 
cates the  mind,  by  giving  a  logical  background  to 
existence,  or  enabling  the  creature  to  distinguish  what 
is  real  or  generic  in  things  from  what  is  merely  phe- 
nomenal and  specific,  so  furnishing  a  basis  for  the  sub- 
sequent development  of  his  spiritual  intelligence,  or 
his  living  perception  of  the  Divine  name.  Thus  in 
Swedenborg's  doctrine  of  creation  natm*e  plays  the 
precise  part  which  "  nothing  "  is  made  to  play  in  the 
ordinary  theory.  For,  as  I  have  said,  creation  is  vul- 
garly conceived  to  be  a  strictly  magical  *  or  irrational 

*  Magic  is  the  power  of  instantaneous  creation :  the  art  of  produ- 
cing things  irrationally,  or  without  the  use  of  means,  thus  by  sheer 
force  of  will,  and  without  any  aid  of  the  understanding.  It  is  the 
pretension  to  produce  offspring  without  maternity,  form  without  sub- 
stance, soul  without  body,  spirit  without  flesh,  life  without  existence. 
So  that  if  God  should  create  spiritual  existence,  as  we  commonly  sup- 
pose Him  to  have  done  —  i.  e.  directly  or  without  nature's  interven- 
tion—  not  only  would  He  confess  Himself  a  mere  flashy  showman  or 
conjurer,  but  the  existence  so  created  would  turn  out  a  monstrous  im- 


132  THE  EDUCATIVE  USE 

procedure  of  God,  whereby  He  evokes  all  things  out 
of  nothing.  The  common  people  hold  so  unscrupu- 
lously to  this  idea,  that  persons  among  them  of  very 
good  intelligence  have  no  doubt  that  the  magic  which 
creates  might  again,  if  it  pleased,  reduce  what  is  cre- 
ated to  its  primeval  "  nothing  "-ness.  Now  it  is  easy 
to  see  the  part  which  "  nothing  "  is  made  to  play  in 
this  popular  hypothesis  of  creation.  It  serves  precisely 
to  emphasize  or  underscore  existence,  to  give  it  that 

posture  utterly  devoid  of  rational  depth  or  character:  for  manifestly 
the  stream  cannot  transcend  its  source,  and  if  the  creator  be  a  charla- 
tan, the  creature  must  a  fortiori  be  a  deception.  Our  theologies,  of 
course,  intend  no  dishonor  to  the  creative  name  but  the  contrary  when 
they  represent  the  spiritual  creation  as  devoid  of  natural  substance,  or 
as  being  the  instantaneous  product  of  God's  unlimited  wiQ.  But  nev- 
ertheless magical  or  irrational  power  is  the  only  power  they  implicitly 
ascribe  to  God's  perfection.  I  know  of  no  pvdpit  wliicli  does  not  habitu- 
ally interpret  the  Divine  omnipotence  into  a  faculty  of  unlimited  hocus 
focus,  or  irrational  and  immediate  creation  from  Himself:  thus  into  a 
power  of  purely  arbitrary  or  capricious  —  which  is  essentially  mad  — 
action;  a  power  of  doing  as  he  wiUs,  without  regard  either  to  the  be- 
neficent ends  His  infinite  love  conceives  in  endowing  his  creatures  with 
life,  or  to  the  exquisite  means  His  infinite  wisdom  provides  in  order  to 
carry  those  ends  out.  They  thus  in  effect  make  God's  glory  to  lie  in 
His  really  being  what  every  low  juggler  in  the  land  only  makes  believe 
to  be,  namely :  a  maker  of  something  out  of  nothing ;  and  hence  they 
fix  their  votaries  in  an  attitude  of  such  insincere  worship  towards  the 
most  High,  as  to  vindicate  even  to  a  cursory  intelligence  the  foresight 
of  Christ,  when  he  predicted  that  the  professional  rehgion  of  his  own 
nominal  followers  would  prove  the  chief  obstacle  to  liis  second  or 
spiritual  advent. 


OF  OUR  NATURAL  EXPERIENCE.        133 

logical  relief,  background,  or  mother-substance  which 
it  needs  in  order  to  be  recognized  by  oiu*  intelligence, 
and  which  in  Swedenborg's  more  philosophic  view  is 
supplied  by  nature. 

Thus  the  popular  mind  cuts  itself  off  from  any 
just  insight  into  the  philosophy  of  creation,  because 
it  holds  to  nature  as  created,  and  consequently  is 
obliged  to  resort  to  "  nothing,"  or  non-existence,  as 
the  only  conceivable  mother-substance  out  of  which 
it  could  be  fashioned.  To  show  the  fallacy  of  the 
church  cosmogony,  accordingly,  nothing  more  is 
needed  than  to  deny  its  fundamental  principle,  which 
is,  the  existence  of  "  nothing,"  or  the  reality  of  non- 
existence. Nothing  does  not  exist  in  rerum  naturd. 
Things  and  persons,  or  objective  and  subjective  ex- 
istences, divide  the  entire  realm  of  nature  between 
them ;  and  to  claim  that  "  nothing  "  exists,  neverthe- 
less, in  some  preposterous  Umbo  bei/ond  the  realm  of 
nature,  and  constitutes  that  unthinkable  substance  out 
of  which  nature  was  educed,  is  a  denial  of  the  spiritual 
world,  and  convicts  the  claimant  of  gross  philosophic 
fatuity.  For  if  "  nothing  "  exists  beyond  nature,  spirit 
or  life  has  no  existence.  In  fact  "  nothing,"  in  this 
depraved  cosmologic  sense  of  it,  is  a  term  invented  to 
cover  or  eke  o^^t  men's  infirm  conception  of  being. 
Men  conceive  of  being  not  as  inwardly  or  logically  — 
but  as  outwardly  or  ontologically  —  generated ;  that  is 


134  GENESIS  OF  THIS  ABSURD 

to  say,  as  constituted  or  made  up  of  mere  existence  in 
space  and  time.  The  tree  before  my  window  appar- 
ently exists  in  space  and  time,  and  this  appearance  is 
enough  to  give  the  tree  being  to  the  popular  imagina- 
nation.  Cut  the  tree  down  accordingly,  and  you 
have  a  corresponding  dearth  of  being,  which  men 
express  by  saying  that  "  nothing  "  really  exists  in  the 
tree's  place.  In  short,  they  regard  specific  existence 
as  the  presence  of  being,  and  specific  non-existence  as 
the  absence  of  it ;  and  hence,  as  I  have  already  said, 
they  regard  being  as  ontologically  constituted,  that  is, 
as  made  up  of  existence  in  time  and  space.  Whereas 
the  very  most  you  are  entitled  to  say  in  the  premises  is, 
that  being  is  apparently  manifested  by  existence,  and 
manifested,  moreover,  to  a  style  of  intelligence  which 
is  entirely  unacquainted  with  what  being  is  in  truth. 
Your  image  in  a  looking-glass  is  an  apparent  mani- 
festation of  your  existence,  or  even  of  your  being  as 
thus  ontologically  conceived :  but  surely  you  would 
never  allow  that  your  being  or  your  existence  was  in 
any  way  constituted  by  such  appearance. 

To  the  ordinary  apprehension  the  creator  is  d^  per- 
son, and  exists,  as  a  person  necessarily  must  exist,  in 
space  and  time ;  and  creation  to  the  same  apprehen- 
sion is  a  thing,  also  existing  or  projected  from  Him  in 
space  and  time,  but  involving  infinitely  less  than  He 
does  of  these  ontological  elements.     The  creature  of 


COSMOLOGICAL   "NOTHING."  135 

Divine  power  is  doubtless  popularly  held  to  be  in- 
finitely inferior  to  the  creator  in  other  respects  also,  as 
in  love,  in  wisdom,  and  in  power ;  but  the  difference 
between  them  which  dominates  every  other  is  this 
brutal  personal  difference,  arising  from  the  assumed 
infinitude  of  the  one  in  time  and  space,  and  the 
obvious  finiteness  of  the  other  in  those  regards.  It  is 
this  low  carnal  estimate  of  the  creative  truth  which 
turns  all  our  sectarian  theology  into  rank  intellectual 
poison,  and  renders  it  exquisitely  nauseous  to  every 
heart  and  mind  at  all  emancipated  from  sense.  It 
takes  for  granted  that  the  creature  is  his  own  spiritual 
or  real  being  as  well  as  his  own  natural  or  phenome- 
nal form,  and  hence  exhibits  the  creator,  who  is  thus 
excluded  from  any  internal  relation  to  the  creature, 
as  restricted  to  a  purely  external  activity  towards  him, 
or  an  interference  with  his  freedom  so  very  w^anton 
and  malignant  as  ends  by  filling  the  world  with  every 
sinister  apprehension  of  the  Divine  name.  It  is  the 
same  superstitious  conception  of  creation  which  is  em- 
bodied in  the  letter  of  revelation.  Swedenborg  no 
doubt  justifies  it  in  its  own  place,  that  is,  in  accommo- 
dation to  the  early  or  uninstructed  scientific  intelli- 
gence of  the  race,  while  as  yet  the  sciences  of  obser- 
vation had  not  come  to  fill  that  intelligence  out,  or 
give  it  body,  by  interpreting  Nature  into  Man.  He 
regards  it  both  as  in  itself  a  very  gross  and  misleading 


136  CREATION  AS  A  LETTER 

effigy  of  the  creative  idea,  and  at  the  same  time  prac- 
tically as  an  altogether  invaluable  one,  because  it  was 
so  eminently  fitted  to  be  lodged  in  the  servile  memory 
or  devout  imagination  of  the  race,  until  such  time  as 
men's  intelligence  should  have  become  quickened  to 
discern  the  living  and  spiritual  truth  of  the  case. 
Thus  it  all  the  while  bears  to  his  imagination,  in  this 
crude  literal  form,  just  as  inverse  a  resemblance  to 
the  eternal  truth  of  things,  as  an  egg  bears  to  the 
chicken  which  is  eventually  to  be  hatched  from  it,  or 
as  the  squalid  sand  of  the  sea  bears  to  the  gorgeous 
temples  and  palaces  of  living  art  which  are  yet  to  be 
wrought  from  its  dismal  wastes. 

We  see,  then,  dear  friend,  that  in  Swedenborg's 
view,  no  intellectual  interest  attaches  to  the  creative 
problem  in  so  far  as  it  is  scientijic  merely,  or  contem- 
plates creation  itself  not  as  a  spiritual,  living,  or  re- 
generate result  exclusively,  but  only  as  a  quasi-\\ymg, 
natural,  or  generate  one.  A  universe  of  animals  might 
furnish  an  agreeable  spectacle  to  the  human  intelli- 
gence, and  even  awaken  in  it  admiration  of  the  crea- 
tive power ;  only  there  w^ould  be  then  no  human  in- 
telligence present,  no  intelligence  capable  of  enjoying 
the  spectacle,  or  recognizing  the  power  displayed  in 
it  to  be  Divine.  The  human  intellect  is  not  bred  of 
any  observation  of  the  order  of  nature,  or  capacity  of 
adaptation  between  it  and  the  mind ;  it  is  originally 


AN   IMMENSE  FALLACY.  137 

quickened  and  born  of  man's  adoring  heart,  or  of  his 
perception  that  nature  manifests  a  power  superior  to 
itself  to  which  all  his  moral  and  rational  allegiance  is 
due.  And  this  power  he  recognizes  as  Divine  only 
because  it  is  miraculous,  that  is,  able  to  originate  a 
free  or  spontaneous  style  of  life  capable  of  immortal 
fellowship  with  Himself.  The  highest  and  best  in- 
tellect of  man  grows  out  of  his  worshipful  heart ;  and 
his  heart's  worship,  whenever  real,  is  energized  by 
the  conviction  that  God's  perfection  is  most  distinc- 
tively human,  or  without  personal  ends;  in  other 
words,  that  God  is  great  enough  in  absolutely  reject- 
ing every  man's  personal  or  interested  homage,  to 
care  solely  and  above  all  things  for  every  man's  spir- 
itual or  living  sympathy  and  fellowship. 

With  these  hints  you  will  not  be  likely  to  do  in- 
justice to  Swedenborg's  comprehensive  treatment  of 
creation  in  shutting  it  up  to  the  sphere  of  conscious- 
ness. I  have  tried  to  bring  out  the  motherly  char- 
acter of  his  teaching,  the  incomparably  tender  and 
succulent  aspect  which  it  bears  to  the  guileless, 
unmercenary  heart  of  man.  The  difference,  in  fact, 
between  his  teaching  and  that  of  all  our  laborious 
philosophic  journeymen  from  Descartes  down  to  the 
modern  scientific  school  of  thought,  is  the  differ- 
ence between  mother's  milk  and  a  Strasburg  pate : 
the  former  teaching  being  addressed  exclusively  to 


138  CREATION   HAS   NO  LOCUS  IN  QUO 

the  needs  of  a  nascent  and  most  tender  spiritual  intel- 
ligence in  man,  the  latter  to  the  wants  of  a  debauched 
and  worn-out  intellectual  digestion,  living  only  upon 
stimulants.  Swedenborg's  primary  demand  upon  his 
reader  is  a  heart  attuned  to  goodness ;  and  he  leaves 
what  subsequent  truth  he  reports  to  his  intellect 
fearlessly  and  without  argument  to  the  heart's  sole 
arbitrament.  And  every  man  who  sincerely  loves  the 
neighbor,  or  whose  zeal  for  the  human  race  is  at 
least  equal  to  the  zeal  he  is  in  the  habit  of  expending 
on  his  own  account,  is  bound  eventually  to  stumble 
on  "his  unostentatious  books,  and  reap  the  abundant 
stores  of  nutriment  there  and  nowhere  else  pro- 
vided for  the  intellect.  Swedenborg  never  betrays  by 
any  chance  the  least  of  an  intellectual  self-conscious- 
ness, and  yet,  if  intellectual  power  is  to  be  measured 
by  the  measure  of  truth  possessed,  it  would  seem  un- 
affectedly ludicrous,  to  any  one  acquainted  with  his 
writings,  that  any  other  person  in  the  intellectual 
history  of  the  race  should  "  be  named,"  as  they  say, 
"in  the  same  day  with  him."  For  even  the  Divine 
creation  itself,  being  a  spiritual  or  living  truth,  is  not 
the  least  with  him  an  outward  or  objective  event,  but 
falls  with  all  its  miraculous  machinery  of  space  and 
time,  or  all  the  vaunted  life  of  nature,  so-called,  clea7i 
within  the  compass  of  the  human  understoMding ;  and  is 
a  truth  therefore  of  our  growing  human  consciousness 


BUT  THE  HUMAN  CONSCIOUSNESS.  139 

exclusively,  coming  home  to  the  business  and  bosoms 
of  the  race  as  no  other  truth  begins  to  do.  For  what 
in  brief  is  creation  spiritually  pronounced?  //  is  ihe 
evolution  of  mans  nature  in  exact  harmony  itith  the 
Divine  perfection,  or  its  plenary  redemjMon  out  of 
selfish  into  social  form  and  order.  It  does  not  contem- 
plate, save  by  implication,  either  our  unconscious 
physical  genesis,  or  om*  conscious  moral  exodus,  but 
addresses  itself  directly  and  exclusively  to  the  spiritual- 
ization  of  our  nature.  //  is  life  eternal  to  knoiv  God ; 
and  hence  creation  in  any  wise  estimation  can  only 
mean  the  purification  of  our  natural  knowledge,  the 
exaltation  of  our  flesh-and-blood  consciousness,  until 
it  compasses  infinitude.  It  can  only  mean,  in  other 
words,  giving  the  creature  universal  spiritual  or  social 
form,  never  particular  moral  or  physical  substance. 
The  creator,  of  course,  takes  these  lower  things  for 
granted :  physical  substance  being  implied  in  moral 
form,  and  moral  substance  in  social  or  spiritual  form, 
just  as  the  foundation  of  the  house  is  implied  in  the 
house,  or  earth  in  heaven,  effect  in  cause,  stream  in 
fountain.  So  Swedenborg  shows  all  lower  things  to 
be  involved  in  higher,  physical  in  moral,  and  moral  in 
spiritual,  existence,  but  never  confounds  the  two.  By 
thus  planting  the  creative  problem  on  higher  ground 
than  it  has  ever  before  occupied,  or  carrying  it  back 
to  the  infinite  heart  of  God,  he  has  anticipated  every 


140        ITS   SOLE   AND   TOTAL   METHOD  :   REDEMPTION. 

really  intellectual  obstacle  to  the  acknowledgment  of 
creation :  since  these  obstacles  all  pivot  upon  the  diffi- 
culty of  accounting  for  finite  existence,  or  reconcil- 
ing the  creature's  identity  with  the  infinitude  of  the 
creator. 


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LETTER     XIII. 


T  DEAR  FRIEND:  — It  is  popularly 
conceived  that  the  world  is  administered 
on  positive  and  not  on  negative  princi- 
ples ;  in  an  active  and  not  in  a  passive 
manner;  in  a  way  for  example  to  promote  tlie  ease, 
honor,  and  emolument  of  the  administrator,  and  not 
to  cause  him  shame,  confusion,  and  anguish.  The 
Creator  is  universally  supposed  to  occupy  a  position 
of  the  grossest  sensible  objectivity  to  the  creature,  a 
position  fruitful  on  occasion  of  the  greatest  conceiv- 
able tyranny  and  oppression ;  and  the  creature  a  posi- 
tion of  the  subtlest  spiritual  subjectivity  to  tlie  Cre- 
ator, a  position  susceptible  on  occasion  of  the  greatest 
conceivable  dread,  horror,  and  aversion. 

Now  this  reputed  relation  between  God  and  man 
in  the  first  instance,  and  man  and  God  in  the  second, 
is  in  the  point  of  view  of  Philosophy  an  immense 
illusion  ;  because  Philosophy  identifies  the  subjcctiv^e 
element  in  the  creative  equation  exclusively  with  the 


142  GOD  THE  SOLE  SUBJECT  IN  CREATION, 

Creator,  and  the  objective  element  exclusively  with 
the  creature.  That  is  to  say:  Philosophy  regards 
creation  not  as  a  material  or  mechanical,  but  as  a 
purely  spiritual  or  living  operation  of  God  in  the 
created  nature ;  and  hence  cannot  help  looking  upon 
the  Creator  alone  as  the  proper  subject  of  the  opera- 
tion, and  upon  the  creature  alone  as  its  proper  object. 
For  creation,  being  spiritual  or  living,  consists,  first, 
in  a  communication  on  the  Creator's  part  of  His  own 
life  or  being  to  the  creature  \  and  evidently  this  com- 
munication stamps  the  Creator  as  essentially  subjec- 
tive to  His  creature,  that  is,  essentially  passive  or 
suffering  in  his  behalf;  and,  seco7idli/,  in  a  reaction 
or  receptivity  on  the  creature's  part  to  such  commu- 
nication :  and  this  reaction  or  receptivity  evidently 
stamps  the  creatm-e  as  essentially  objective  to  the 
Creator;  that  is,  essentially  active  or  joyous.  In 
other  words  creation  spiritually  regarded  makes  the 
Creator  the  sole  and  total  subjective  life  of  the  crea- 
ture, and  the  creature  in  his  turn  the  sole  and  total 
objective  hfe  of  the  Creator.  The  vulgar  misconcep- 
tion of  it,  accordingly,  by  which  man  is  made  God's 
submissive  subject,  and  God  is  made  man's  control- 
ling object,  is  grossly  illusory  to  Philosophy;  but  it 
is  an  illusion,  nevertheless,  which  is  strictly  incidental 
to  the  creature's  unripe  intelligence,  and  hence  claims 
above  all  things  to  be  understood,  not  denounced. 


MAN   THE  SOLE  OBJECT.  143 

It  is  logically  in  fact  the  very  essence  of  the  cre- 
ative idea,  that  creation  is  practically  a  marriage  of 
Creator  and  creature,  v^^hereby  the  creature  alone  spir- 
itually is,  or  becomes  infinited  in  the  Creator,  while 
the  Creator  alone  naturally  exists,  or  becomes  finite, 
in  the  creature  :  so  that  the  creature  has  at  most  only 
a  seeming  or  phenomenal  existence  in  Mmself,  even 
while  he  has  at  the  same  time  a  most  real  or  abso- 
lute and  unqualified  being  in  his  Creator.  It  is  true 
enough  no  doubt  that  the  creature  —  through  his 
bottomless  ignorance  on  one  hand  of  the  truth  that 
creation  is  a  purely  spiritual  work  of  God  in  the 
created  nature,  and  through  his  bottomless  conceit 
on  the  other  that  it  is  an  altogether  shabby  natural 
work  of  God  effected  in  the  creature's  petty  self — 
egregiously  misinterprets  this  fundamental  logic,  or 
attributes  to  himself  and  not  to  the  Creator  his  natu- 
ral or  finite  personality,  while  he  remains  persistently 
blind  and  deaf  to  the  spiritual  and  infinite  being  he 
and  all  his  kind  have  in  God.  But  the  spiritual 
truth  of  the  case  is  not  a  whit  inwardly  altered  or 
even  prejudiced  by  this  mistake ;  it  is  only  outwardly 
obscured  or  deadened.  What  alone  happens  is  that 
the  spiritual  or  creative  truth  is  obliged  to  lower 
itself  to  the  creature's  sensuous  and  grovelling  imagi- 
nation, by  masking  itself  in  moral  lineaments,  or 
taking  the  creature   at   his  own   stupid  estimate  of 


j^44         ciieatio:n  only  a  philosophic  name 

himself,  and  addi'essing  liim  as  if  lie  were  in  truth 
his  own  natural  substance,  and  God  himself  conse- 
quently his  mere  outward  and  moral  or  regulative 
law.  And  this  is  literally  all  that  happens.  Crea- 
tion becomes  converted  in  men's  infirm  understand- 
ing from  a  spiritual,  or  infinite  and  eternal,  Divine 
life  in  the  unconsciom  nature  of  the  creature,  which 
has  therefore  strictly  public  or  universal  issues  in 
humanity,  into  a  mere  legal  or  moral  administration 
of  Divine  power  in  the  conscious  jjerson  of  the  crea- 
ture, having  at  best  therefore  strictly  private  or  par- 
ticular issues. 

Let  creation,  then,  in  the  sole  and  exclusive  spir- 
itual truth  of  the  word,  remain  perfectly  intact,  dear 
friend,  to  our  particular  faith,  whether  all  the  world 
say  us  nay  or  yea.  Let  it  be  to  us  both  forever 
nothing  else  than  an  inmost  and  inseparable  life  of 
God  within  the  strictest  limits  of  our  nature,  where- 
by that  nature  —  gladly  responsive  to  such  an  un- 
precedented subject !  —  becomes  freely  redeemed  out 
of  its  otherwise  inveterate  personal  or  selfish  linea- 
ments, into  the  imperishable  image  and  likeness  of 
God  most  High,  that  is,  into  grandly  social  form 
and  order.  Neither  you  nor  I  have  ever  had,  have 
now,  or  ever  shall  have,  any  particle  of  just  or  ra- 
tional hope  towards  God  which  is  based  either 
upon  any  possible  personal  difference  in  us  to  other 


FOR   OUR   NATURAL   REDESIPTION.  '145 

men,  or  any  possible  personal  difference  in  us  to 
ourselves  in  past  time,  but  solely  and  wholly  upon 
His  own  reconciling  spirit  or  temper  in  universal 
man,  whereby  we  and  all  men  become  gradually 
softened  and  refined  out  of  our  natural  egotism  and 
savagery,  by  being  lifted  out  of  our  petty  egotistic 
moral  consciousness,  and  becoming  gradually  in- 
vested with  social  or  race-consciousness.  This  is 
what  creation,  spiritually  regarded,  means,  and  all  it 
means,  not  any  stupid  and  brutal  event  in  space 
and  time,  transcending  human  nature  and  antedat- 
ing human  history,  but  a  most  real  and  authentic 
life  of  God  identical  with  human  nature  and  con- 
substantiate  with  human  history  :  beginning  with 
that  history,  animating  all  its  movements,  keeping 
steadfast  pace  with  it  through  all  its  marvellous  vicis- 
situdes and  revolutions,  and  bringing  it  at  length 
to  its  grand  triumphant  climax  in  the  coming  splen- 
dors of  the  mystical  city  of  God.  Thus  our  spirit- 
ual creation  is  only  the  truer  or  philosophic  name 
for  our  distinctively  natural  redemption  :  since 
nothing  short  of  this  redemptive  work  can  establish 
the  Divine  claim  to  be  a  universal  creator.  I  know, 
for  my  own  part  at  least,  very  well,  that  it  must 
prove  a  "  scandal "  to  our  imitative  modern  Juda- 
ism, and  "  foolishness "  to  our  simulated  modern 
Hellenism,  but  I  cannot  help  saying  all  the  same, 


146  WHAT  DO  WE  MEAN 

)ior  rejoicing  as  I  say  it,  that  I  look  upon  the  fast- 
approaching  close  of  our  corrupt  civilization  in  the 
New  Jerusalem  —  which  is  the  Gospel  symbol  for 
the  evolution  of  a  free  society,  fellowship,  or  equal- 
ity of  all  men  with  each  and  each  with  all  on  earth 
and  in  heaven  —  as  the  veritable  apotheosis  of  our 
nature,  since  it  will  reveal  and  vindicate  to  eternal 
years,  not  the  truth  of  God's  spiritual  or  essential 
manhood,  for  that  has  been  long  acknowledged,  but 
to  us  the  infinitely  more  momentous  because  infi- 
nitely more  prolific,  truth  of  His  natural  or  ad- 
ventitious manhood :  a  manhood  forced  upon  Him, 
so  to  speak,  in  the  interest  of  the  strictly  universal 
—  which  are  the  lowest  corporeal  and  sensual  — 
needs  of  His  creature. 

But  what  precisely  do  we  mean  by  the  created 
nature  ? 

"  Nature,"  then,  when  used  abstractly  means  the 
realm  of  the  undefined  or  relative  in  knowledge ; 
means  that  vast  potentiality  of  existence  which  per- 
petually allures  and  at  the  same  time  baffles  the 
grasp  of  science,  inasmuch  as  it  is  always  becom- 
ing, yet  never  is  definitively  known.  It  signifies 
what  is  generic,  impersonal,  or  universal  in  exist- 
ence, in  contradistinction  to  what  is  specific,  personal, 
or  particular.  It  is  not  of  course  what  creates,  that 
is,  gives  invisible  being  or  substance  to  things ;  but 


BY  THE  TERM  NATURE?  147 

only  what  constitutes  them,  that  is,  gives  them  vis- 
ible form  or  existence.  It  is  tlie  maternal  principle 
in  existence,  thus  what  produces  all  things  or  gives 
them  body,  in  opposition  to  the  paternal  principle 
which  begets  them,  or  gives  them  soul.  In  short, 
Nature  is  what  all  men  instinctively  believe  in,  yet 
what  no  man  has  ever  had  sensible  contact  with. 
We  cannot  help  believing  in  it,  because  we  see  it 
revealed  as  we  think  in  its  endlessly  varied  phe- 
nomena or  productions ;  but  we  have  and  can  have 
no  direct  acquaintance  with  it,  because  it  is  not  the 
least  a  fact  of  sense,  but  at  most  a  probable  truth 
of  science.  From  the  necessity  of  the  case,  or  in 
the  interest  of  science  itself,  it  must  always  remain 
a  merely  probable  —  that  is,  a  strictly  imdemonstrated 
—  truth :  for  if  Nature,  or  the  universe  of  om'  sci- 
entific faith,  could  once  be  grasped  by  observation, 
and  so  be  forced  to  confess  itself  Thing  instead  of 
Thought,  science  would  ipso  facto  lose  her  whole 
intellectual  capital,  would  forfeit  in  fact  her  sole 
raison  d'etre,  and  be  obliged  to  tumble  inconti- 
nently back  into  the  arms  of  sense.  To  be  sure  we 
talk  very  glibly  of  "  the  laws  of  Nature " ;  and 
where  "  laws  "  are  of  recognized  obligation,  it  should 
be  presumable  at  least  that  the  lawgiver  is  very 
distinctly  known.  But  these  so-called  "  laws  of  na- 
ture "  are  laws  of  human  thought  exclusively,  and 


148  NATURE  A  STRICTLY  SUBJECTIVE, 

laws  of  nature  only  in  so  far  as  nature  itself  is 
taken  for  a  symbol  of  the  mind.  That  is  to  say, 
they  are  only  so  many  scientific  generalizations  on 
our  part  based  upon  sensible  observation,  whereby 
the  mind  moved  by  a  profound  instinct  of  its  spir- 
itual origin  and  destiny,  seeJcs  unconsciously  to  uni- 
versalize itself,  and  so  wrest  from  "Nature"  the 
provisional  or  educative  and  superstitious  homage  it 
has  so  long  enjoyed. 

Nature  in  short,  thus  abstractly  viewed,  is  the  only 
purely  subjective  existence  we  are  acquainted  with, 
inasmuch  as  it  never  falls  under  the  cognizance  of 
our  senses,  but  invariably  posits  itself  as  the  attri- 
bute of  a  subject,  and  utterly  refuses  to  be  cogi- 
tated apart  from  such  subjectivity.  It  is  true  that 
some  one  may  object  to  regarding  nature  as  this 
strictly  subjective  or  metaphysical  quantity,  on  the 
ground  that  we  are  in  the  habit  of  applying  the 
term  to  the  external  world,  which  is  made  up  of 
sensibly  objective  existences.  But  it  is  a  sufficient 
answer  to  this  objection  to  say  that  we  always 
apply  the  term  to  the  world  as  a  whole,  or  by  way 
of  discriminating  what  is  generic  or  universal  in 
the  sphere  of  sense,  even,  from  what  is  specific  or 
particular ;  and  universals  claim  no  physical  but  a 
purely  logical  or  metaphysic  subsistence.  The  world 
or   universe   is   not   a   thing   of  sense,   but   a   pure 


OR  METAPHYSICAL  EXISTEXCE.  149 

thought  of  the  mmd ;  and  when  we  designate  it 
accordingly  by  the  name  of  nature,  the  effect  is  not 
to  degrade  nature  into  a  physical  substance,  but  to 
elevate  the  world  itself,  regarded  as  a  universe  or 
whole,  into  a  metaphysic  substance.  Whatsoever 
exists  to  sense  is  practically  or  at  bottom  nothing 
else  than  a  concrete  or  specific  form  of  the  logical 
or  metaphysic  not-me ;  and  outward  nature,  conse- 
quently, regarded  as  the  universal  term  in  which 
alone  all  our  sense  perceptions  are  supposed  to  co- 
here, is  in  its  turn  but  the  abstract  or  generic 
form  of  this  negative  judgment  on  our  part. 

Then  too  it  ought  to  be  noted,  in  reply  to  the 
objection  just  made,  that  when  the  word  Nature  is 
applied  to  the  external  world,  or  the  phenomena  of 
sense,  it  is  used  just  as  much  to  signify  the  field 
of  the  subjective  and  relative  which  we  find  there : 
only  the  relations  existing  between  minerals,  plants, 
and  animals  are  onhcard  or  objective  relations  exclu- 
sively, which  are  wholly  unknown  to  and  unperceived 
by  the  minerals,  plants,  and  animals  themselves,  and 
which  consequently  presuppose  and  address  our  com- 
manding subjectivity  alone.  The  animal  for  exam- 
ple has  no  science  of  the  relations  of  agreement  or 
difference  which  bind  him  to  his  own  and  other 
species,  although  he  instinctively  obeys  them  doubt- 
less ;    for  they  exist  only  to  another   eye  than  his 


150  CONCRETE  USES  OF  THE   WORD. 

own.  And  all  that  the  observant  eye  of  our  science 
cares  to  signalize  in  these  relations  is  that  they 
characterize  the  animal  nature  apart  from  any  vis- 
ible or  objective  subject  of  it. 

All  the  concrete  uses  of  the  word  betray  the 
same  universalizing  or  undefining  scope  and  ten- 
dency. What  we  call  the  nature  of  a  horse,  of  a 
dog,  of  a  bull,  is  not  what  belongs  primarily  to 
any  particular  animal  so-named,  but  to  the  entire 
horse,  dog,  or  bull  species  or  kind ;  although  the 
particular  animals  in  question  may  be  at  the  same 
time  exceptionably  favorable  specimens  of  their  race. 
And  so  throughout  the  whole  compass  of  the  word's 
concrete  application :  the  nature  of  a  particular  min- 
eral, vegetable,  or  animal,  is  in  every  case  strictly 
what  universalizes,  or  equalizes,  or  identifies  it  with 
its  species  or  kind,  and  so  far  forth  of  course  in- 
dividualizes it  from  all  other  kinds.  But  it  confers 
no  private  individuality  upon  it,  that  is,  no  spirit- 
ual or  subjective  discrimination  with  its  own  kind. 
We  say  to  be  sure  that  one  man  has  a  good  nature, 
and  another  an  evil  nature :  meaning  by  that  phrase, 
that  the  one  is  sensitive  and  the  other  indifferent 
to  his  legal  obligations.  But  all  we  are  really  en- 
titled to  say  in  the  premises  is,  not  that  the  men 
are  of  a  different  nature,  but  that  human  nature 
itself   is  of   so   universal  a  range  or  quality  as  to 


CONCRETE  USES  OF  THE  WORD.  151 

embrace  a  relatively  high  and  a  relatively  low  ele- 
ment, or  exhibit  in  itself  the  sheer  neutrality,  in- 
difference, or  equilibrium  of  good  and  evil :  so  that 
any  particular  subject  of  it  may  be  morally  good, 
and  any  other  particular  subject  morally  evil,  with- 
out the  slightest  strain  or  compromise,  on  either 
side,  of  their  common  nature  For  human  nature  is 
distinctively  social  in  form,  being  the  unity  of  self- 
love  and  neighborly  love  —  thus  of  what  is  widest 
or  most  universal  in  affection  and  thought,  and  what 
is  narrowest  or  most  particular  —  and  the  morally 
good  man  accordingly  is  one  in  whom  the  higher 
element  practically  rules,  while  the  morally  evil  man 
is  one  in  whom  that  element  is  made  practically  to 
serve.  In  short  they  are  men  of  a  strictly  identical 
nature,  and  their  moral  divergence  is  due  to  the 
fact  that  until  human  nature  shall  have  attained  to 
its  destined  sabbath  in  the  permanent  social  evolu- 
tion of  the  race,  the  greatest  possible  antagonism, 
consistent  with  providential  order,  must  necessarily 
prevail  between  its,  component  factors  —  to  the  ex- 
tent even  of  organizing  the  entire  spiritual  world 
into  the  divided  spheres  of  heaven  and  hell. 

Understand  then,  dear  friend,  that  there  is  no  such 
thing,  or  congeries  of  things,  as  what  we  call  nature, 
or  universal  existence.  All  real  existence  is  specific 
or   particular,  so  that  natural,  generic,  or   universal 


152  NATURE   REALIZABLE  TO   TPIOUGHT, 

existence  is  never  physical  but  metaphysical,  discern- 
ible therefore  not  by  sense,  but  exclusively  by  life  or 
consciousness.  It  is  realizable  to  thought,  but  not  to 
sight,  and  herein  differs  from  specific  existence  which 
is  realizable  to  sight,  but  not  to  thought.  The  earth 
really  exists  in  space,  and  plant  and  animal  really 
exist  upon  it  clothing  it  vv^ith  life  and  beauty.  But 
strive  as  we  may,  we  cannot  tliinlc  these  existences ; 
cannot  for  the  life  of  us  think  either  earth  or  plant  or 
animal ;  and  for  the  very  good  reason  that  they  all  of 
them  anticipate  and  supersede  thought,  being  already 
given  to  us  in  sense.  We  can  recall  them  to  mem- 
ory whenever  we  list ;  but  we  cannot  possibly  think 
them  as  we  think  God  and  man,  or  goodness  and 
truth,  grace  and  beauty,  holiness  and  peace,  justice 
and  mercy,  simply  because  they  rigidly  forestall  our 
intelligence,  or  what  is  the  same  thing,  because  un- 
like spiritual  existence  they  have  no  inward  or  living 
but  a  purely  outward  and  sensible  objectivity  to  us. 
It  is  no  way  true  of  course  to  say  that  the  objects  of 
sense  into  which  we  are  born,  spiritually  create  our 
intelligence  or  give  it  soul ;  but  it  is  perfectly  true  to 
say  that  they  materially  comtitute  it,  or  give  it  body, 
cradhng  and  nursing  it  indeed  upon  the  chaste 
breasts  of  their  maternity,  until  such  time  as  it  is  fit 
to  be  weaned  from  sense,  and  fed  upon  truth  alone. 
But  we  do  unquestionably  think  nature  or  universal 


BUT  NOT  TO  SENSE.  153 

existence,  and  can  do  no  more  than  tldnk  it ;  because 
it  is  not  the  least  given  us  in  sense,  but  is  on  the 
contrary  a  most  strict  projection  of  the  spiritual 
world,  or  the  associated  human  mind,  upon  our  pri- 
vate and  personal  thought.  We  do  not  see  nature  or 
the  universe ;  neither  do  we  hear  it,  nor  smell  it,  nor 
taste  it,  nor  touch  it.  And  being  thus  wholly  inac- 
cessible to  our  senses,  it  can  never  fall  within  the 
conditions  of  our  memory  even ;  for  we  can  remem- 
ber nothing  and  imagine  nothing  which  is  wliolly 
divorced  from  sense.  But  we  think  nature  or  uni- 
versal existence  day  and  night;  and  we  think  noth- 
ing else.  Our  living  intellect  —  which  is  heart  and 
mind  in  actual  unison  —  broods  upon  it,  feeds  upon 
it,  waxes  fat  upon  it,  vehemently  denies  itself  at  last 
either  anchorage  or  sustenance  apart  from  it.  We 
love  and  cherish  it,  we  confide  in  it,  we  adore  it,  we 
aspire  to  it,  we  associate  our  eternal  fortunes  with  it 
—  do  everything  in  short  but  pretend  outwardly  or 
sensibly  to  know  it. 

But  what  we  want  just  now  is  to  discover  the 
exact  intellectual  significance  of  human  nature,  that 
we  may  be  able  to  assign  its  due  philosophic  weight 
and  function  in  the  evolution  of  the  spiritual  creation. 
Let  us  accordingly  address  ourselves  forthwith  to  this 
latter  interest. 

As  by  the  nature  of  a  thing  we  always  mean  to 


154  HUMAN  NATURE  IS  THE  SPHERE 

express  what  to  the  eye  of  science  gives  the  thing 
objective  relation  with  other  things,  so  too.  by  human 
nature  we  mean  to  express  the  sphere  exclusively  of 
the  relative  in  human  life,  only  the  relations  which 
connect  man  with  man  are  not  such  as  can  be  scien- 
tifically discerned.  They  are  not,  like  the  other,  ex- 
ternal relations  which  address  the  sense;  they  are 
internal  relations,  which  appeal  for  their  truth  only 
to  consciousness.  This  establishes  a  great  discrep- 
ancy between  human  and  brute  life.  The  relations 
which  exist  between  man  and  man,  and  which  reflect 
their  characteristically  human  nature,  are  not,  like 
those  of  the  animal,  outward  and  organic.  Man  to 
be  sure  has  these  outward  and  organic  relations  also 
to  his  fellow-man,  but  it  is  only  in  so  far  as  he  is  yet 
undivorced  from  animal,  or  uneducated  into  man. 
The  relations  which  bind  the  partakers  of  human 
nature  together,  as  such,  are  intensely  living  and  con- 
scious, or  inward  and  aesthetic,  instead  of  outward 
and  organic.  They  are  relations,  not  of  appetite  and 
passion,  controlled  by  necessity  and  duty,  but  of  taste 
or  attraction,  governed  exclusively  by  the  freedom  or 
spontaneity  of  the  parties ;  and  consequently,  as  the 
saying  is,  they  never  leave  any  bad  taste  in  the 
mouth  behind  them.  The  contrary  is  well  known  to 
be  the  case  when  men  identify  themselves  with  the 
animal  nature,  and  cherish  its  lower  delights :   for  in 


OF  MAN'S  SUBJECTIVE  EELATIONS.  155 

SO  doing  they  only  reap  disgust,  degradation,  and 
frequent  despair.  This  sharp  discrepancy  of  the  hu- 
man nature  with  the  brute  nature  is  owing  of  course 
to  the  truth  of  the  spiritual  creation,  and  is  one  of  its 
most  constant  attestations.  Man's  nature,  M^hatever 
the  splendors  of  Divine  power  incident  to  it,  is  after 
all  nothing  but  a  vehicle  of  transcendent  spiritual 
blessing  to  the  man  himself;  whereas  the  brute  na- 
ture knows  no  such  spiritual  subserviency.  And 
when  accordingly  the  subject  of  the  higher  nature 
persistently  identifies  himself  with  the  lower,  he  is 
sure  to  find  in  his  way  every  sharp  regret  and  bitter 
humiliation  which  may  tend  to  frighten  him  back 
into  his  place.  Otherwise  he  would  be  like  a  noble 
house  ruined  by  bad  drainage. 

And  now,  dear  friend,  I  think  you  and  I  have 
attained  to  a  pretty  definite  notion  of  what  consti- 
tutes human  nature.  Human  nature  is  the  field 
exclusively  of  man's  subjective  relations  to  his  kind, 
and  constitutes  therefore  the  realm  of  identify  among 
men,  the  realm  in  which  all  men,  whatever  may  be 
their  individual  or  spiritual  diff'erences  to  their  own 
eye,  are  one  and  undistinguishable  to  God.  And 
being  such  it  is  the  appanage  or  attribute  of  course 
of  a  conscious  or  living  subject,  whose  existence  it 
therefore  presupposes,  just  as  the  work  of  a  statuary 
presupposes  the  existence  of  the  marble.     I  say  of 


156  IT  HAS  NO  EXISTENCE  BUT 


course,  for  this  field  of  relatioiisliip  between  man  and 
man,  being  intensely  subjective,  that  is,  free,  sponta- 
neous, inorganic,  living,  never  falls  by  any  chance 
within  sense,  like  the  relations  of  the  animal,  but  ex- 
clusively within  consciousness.  It  is  the  whole  virtue 
and  efficacy  of  sense  to  antagonize  one  thing  with 
another,  to  concentrate  and  inflame  points  of  dis- 
cord and  difference  between  things.  And  if  men 
accordingly  w^ere  not  endowed  with,  a  deeper  Hfe 
than  that  of  sense,  namely,  consciousness  :  or  the 
faculty  of  discerning  the  free  or  subjective  unity 
which  exists  among  them,  in  spite  of  their  super- 
ficial or  obvious  and  outward  personal  disjunction  : 
they  would  always  have  remained  the  inveterate 
animals  they  were  aboriginally  born,  nor  ever  have 
dreamt  consequently  of  the  infinite  possibilities  w^hich 
had  been  squandered  in  their  own  ineffectual  hu- 
man form. 

Understand  then,  dear  friend,  that  human  nature 
has  no  existence  in  se,  but  is  invariably  the  attri- 
bute of  a  conscious  subject,  whose  existence  is  pre- 
supposed by  it.  It  is  almost  superfluous  to  say 
that  this  natural  subject  must  be  an  exclusively 
conscious  subject,  because  human  nature  has  two 
constitutive  and  extremely  different  elements,  a  finite 
and  an  infinite  one,  or  a  creator  and  creature,  and 
these  two  can  coexist  only  in   the  integral  unity  of 


AS  THE  ATTRIBUTE  OF  A  SUBJECT.  157 

consciousness.  But  this  much  cannot  be  too  em- 
phatically said,  namely  :  the  natural  subject  cannot  be 
a  mere  personal  subject,  cannot  be  what  we  are  apt 
to  call  a  mere  individual  subject,  because  in  that 
case  he  would  practically  exclude  the  race-element. 
You  yourself  know  quite  as  well  as  I  do,  that  your 
own  and  my  style  of  personal*  subjectivity  is  much 
too  finite  to  do  any  sort  of  justice  to  the  generic 
quality  of  our  manhood,  or  wjiat  especially  stamps  it 
natural:  our  personalities  are  so  far  from  doing  our 
nature  justice  in  fact,  that  they  leave  it,  in  our  own 
spiritual  estimation  at  least,  an  every  way  futile, 
petty,  egotistic,  ignominious  thing.  And  what  is 
spiritually  true  of  our  natural  subjectivities  is  true 
no  doubt  of  all  the  world's.  Accordingly,  the  only 
adequate  exponent  of  human  nature  must  be  able  to 
interiorate  his  object  to  himself,  and  not,  like  us, 
merely  exteriorate  it.  He  must  be  a  man  broad 
enough  in  other  words  to  embrace  his  nature,  and 
spiritually  reproduce  it  in  his  own  subjectivity.  In 
short,  he  must  be  both  universal  and  individual, 
both  generic  and  specific,  both  natural  and  spiritual, 
or  comprehend  within  his  own  undefined  and  equa- 
torial personality,  both  poles  of  the  nature  he  claims 
to  make  his  own  —  infinite  and  finite,  Divine  and 
human :  or  else  incontinently  avouch  himself  an  un- 
worthy exponent  and  illustration  of  the  nature. 


158  HUMANITY  NOT  A  MATERIAL  FACT, 

But  I  must  bring  this  long  letter  to  a  close.  It 
is  evident  then  from  what  has  gone  before,  that  — 
pace  Messrs.  Darwin  and  Spencer  —  man's  natural 
genesis  is  not  at  all  physical,  but  on  the  contrary 
strictly  metaphysical,  involving  as  it  does  his  trans- 
formation or  development  out  of  a  selfish  being  into 
a  social  one.  For  humanity  is  not  a  material  fact 
discernible  to  the  outward  eye ;  it  is  a  spiritual 
truth,  discernible  solely  to  the  inward  eye,  an  eye 
rendered  clear  by  love.  It  is  a  society,  not  a  herd 
of  men,  and  claims  a  distinctly  qualitative  not  a 
quantitative  unity.  On  his  animal  side  man  is  doubt- 
less physical  enough,  his  origin  connecting  him  not 
only  with  the  animal  tribes,  but  with  the  vegetable- 
and  mineral  kingdoms  as  well.  But  when  w^e  speak 
of  human  nature,  we  speak  of,  what  logically  be- 
longs to  man  alone,  and  therefore  disconnects  him 
with  all  lower  existence.  This  metaphysical  nature 
of  ours  involves  physics  as  its  necessary  basis  of 
manifestation,  just  as  the  house  involves  its  founda- 
tion, the  tree  its  bark,  the  gem  its  matrix.  For 
the  house  which  towers  to  heaven  to  lay  permanent 
hold  upon  sun  and  air,  descends  first  into  the  bowels 
of  the  earth  to  compel  the  damp  and  darkness  of  the 
latter  sphere  into  its  own  higher  vassalage.  So  pre- 
cisely our  natural  evolution,  which  serves  as  a  matrix 
for  our  subsequent  spiritual  or  individual  conjunction 


BUT  A  SPIRITUAL  TEUTH.  159 

with  infinite  goodness  and  truth,  famiharizes  us  first 
with  the  death  and  hell  latent  in  ourselves,  latent 
in  our  finite  or  personal  consciousness,  in  order  to 
reduce  them  ever  after  to  its  eternal  subserviency. 
Man's  spiritual  destiny  is  so  sublime,  it  is  so  vivi- 
fied and  empowered  by  the  intimate  Divine  fellow- 
ship, as  to  call  for  this  preliminary  wealth  of  mineral, 
vegetable,  and  animal  existence,  in  order  to  furnish 
him  the  alphabet  of  s^^-knowledge,  and  in  that 
knowledge  the  sure  pledge  and  guarantee  of  his 
ultimate  free  or  spiritual  acknowledgment  of  God. 
A  finite  consciousness  can  only  recognize  good  by 
the  previous  contrast  of  evil,  truth  by  the  previous 
contrast  of  error ;  so  man  by  the  experience  of  the 
wretched  death-in-life  wrapped  up  in  his  proper 
person,  learns  truly  to  know  and  heartily  to  aspire 
to  the  only  real  and  true  life.  It  is  the  only 
rational  and  satisfactory  explanation  of  our  moral 
experience  to  look  upon  physics  as  this  necessary 
involution  of  our  natural  evolution  :  our  moral  ex- 
perience being  given  us  only  to  signalize  the  tran- 
sition —  only  to  bridge  the  interval,  and  make  the 
passage  practicable  —  between  our  finite  organic  or 
physical  persons,  and  our  undefined,  inorganic,  im- 
personal, metaphysic  nature :  which  it  does  by  re- 
leasing us  from  the  bondage  of  animal  instinct,  and 
opening  our  interiors  to  spiritual  Divine  influx. 


ICO  HUMAN  NATURE  THE  LIVING  XINK 

Such  I  do  not  hesitate  to  say  is  the  literally  awful 
grandeur  of  human  nature,  as  being  the  sole  link  or 
liaison  between  creator  and  creature,  between  the 
infinitude  of  God  and  the  finiteness  of  man !  And 
such  the  so  long  inscrutable  secret  of  its  incompres- 
sibility  into  any  merely  organic  or  finite  physical 
dimensions !  It  involves  —  lodged  or  masked  in  our 
vicious,  obdurate  personalities  —  a  fossil  infinitude 
or  chronic  Divine  element,  and  insists  upon  this  ele- 
ment being  fairly  reckoned  with  or  put  into  fluid 
diffusible  form,  before  it  will  permit  the  least  right- 
eous judgment  of  itself  to  be  formulated.  And  there 
is  no  nature  properly  speaking  but  human  nature. 
There  is  any  amount  of  specific  mineral,  vegetable, 
and  animal  form,  but  there  is  no  nature  correspond- 
ing to  it,  because  there  is  no  universal  mineral,  vege- 
table, and  animal  substance  except  man,  and  his  na- 
ture infinitely  transcends  their  wants.  His  nature  is 
not  theirs,  any  more  than  their  form  is  his.  The  former 
contingency  is  gainsaid  by  the  circumstance  that  his 
nature  is  a  universal  one  while  theirs  is  partial ;  and 
the  latter  by  the  circumstance  that  their  form  is  spe- 
cific or  gregarious,  while  his  is  strictly  individual. 
Every  man  claims  to  be  estifnated  by  himself  alone, 
every  animal  by  its  species.  Thus  there  is  a  univer- 
sal human  substance  called  selfhood,  not  a  material 
substance,  not   an   organic  substance,  but  a  strictly 


BETWEEN  GOD  AND  MAN.  161 

immaterial  or  inorganic  one  confined  to  consciousness, 
and  hence  incapable  of  scientific  scrutiny.  And  hu- 
man nature  consequently  is  alone  entitled  to  the  des- 
ignation of  Nature,  and  to  absorb  in  itself,  as  so 
many  subject  provinces  merely,  mineral,  vegetable, 
and  animal  existence.  I  do  not  in  the  least  mean  to 
deny  of  course  that  besides  this  generic  diff'erence 
which  I  exhibit  to  all  lower  existence,  and  which 
puts  an  eternal  gulf  between  us,  I  also  exhibit  many 
specific  resemblances  to  it :  being  innocent  with  the 
dove,  subtle  with  the  serpent,  gentle  with  the  lamb, 
fierce  with  the  tiger;  and  so  forth.  These  are  not 
generic  traits  of  humanity,  but  only  and  at  most  spe- 
cific traits,  characterizing  us  not  as  homines,  but  as 
viri :  not  as  we  stand  substantially  knit  together,  all 
and  each,  each  and  all,  in  one  immortal  bond  of 
unity  called  society,  but  only  as  we  stand  superficially 
differenced  each  from  every  other  in  our  petty  selves, 
and  so  become  distributed  by  an  adorable  providential 
wisdom  into  two  great  classes  of  men  —  respectively 
celestial  and  infernal  —  in  which  the  finiting  or  spe- 
cific principle,  the  principle  of  endless  variation  and 
conflict,  and  the  infiniting  or  generic  principle,  the 
principle  of  permanent  unity  and  peace,  are  severally 
represented  or  embodied,  and  held  in  enforced  mu- 
tual equilibrium. 

The  adorable  use  of  this  arrangement  in  the  Divine 


1G2         OUR  SELFHOOD   INEXPLICABLE  WITHOUT 

economy  above  adverted  to,  is  our  natural  or  race- 
development.  For  the  race  of  man,  or  human  nature, 
is  not  the  least  numerically  or  materially  constituted, 
is  not,  as  we  are  apt  to  conceive  it,  the  mere  un- 
couth lumping  or  hideous  agglomeration  of  our  acrid, 
frivolous,  and  uncompromising  selves.  It  is  on  the 
contrary  altogether  qualitatively  or  spiritually  consti- 
tuted, being  an  exquisite  Divine  distillation  of  our 
foul  and  perishable  natural  selfhood,  and  a  subse- 
quent sublimation  or  rectification  of  it  into  an  ineffa- 
ble unitary  form  and  order  called  society.  For  obvi- 
ously if  selfhood  be  the  mere  adventitious  base  out 
of  which  human  nature  or  the  race-consciousness  of 
man  becomes  divinely  fashioned,  it  can  have  no  show 
of  pretension  to  enter  into  the  finished  superstructure 
itself,  save  at  most  as  coloring  matter,  or  perpetually 
vanishing  reminiscence. 

Thus  there  is  no  way  open  to  us  philosophically 
of  accounting  for  selfhood  in  the  human  bosom,  save 
upon  the  postulate  of  its  being  the  mask  of  an  infinite 
sjnritual  substance  now  imprisoned,  but  eventually  to  be 
set  free,  in  our  nature :  a  substance  whose  proper 
energy  consists  in  its  incessantly  going  out  of  itself, 
or  communicating  itself  to  what  is  not  itself,  to  what 
indeed  is  infinitely  alien  and  repugnant  to  itself,  and 
dwelling  there  infinitely  and  eternally  as  in  its  very 
self.     That  is  to  say,  the  Divine  being  or  substance 


THE  CREATOR'S  NATURAL  INCARNATION.  163 

is  Love,  love  without  any  the  least  set-off  or  limita- 
tion of  self-love,  infinite  or  creative  love  in  short ;  and 
it  communicates  itself  to  the  creature  accordingly  in 
no  voluntary  or  finite  but  in  purely  spontaneous  or 
infinite  measure,  in  a  way  so  to  speak  of  overwhelm- 
ing passion :  so  that  we  practically  encounter  no 
limit  to  our  faculty  of  appropriating  it,  but  on  the 
contrary  sensibly  and  exquisitely  feel  it  to  be  our 
own  indisputable  being,  feel  it  to  be  in  fact  our  in- 
most, most  vital  and  inseparable  self,  and  unhesitat- 
ingly call  it  me  and  7uine,  you,  and  yours,  cleaving 
to  it  as  inmost  bone  of  our  bone,  and  veritable  flesh 
of  our  flesh,  and  incontinently  renouncing  all  things 
for  it. 


LETTER     XIV. 


ii^/WY  DEAR  FRIEND  :  — We  have  seen  that 
the  sphere  of  human  nature  is  the  rela- 
tive or  associated  sphere  of  human  hfe, 
the  sphere  of  men's  free,  spontaneous 
fellowship,  each  with  all  and  all  with  each,  in  con- 
tradistinction to  that  of  their  felt  or  personal  abso- 
luteness, which  is  the  sphere  of  their  voluntary, 
interested,  selfish  disjunction  of  each  with  every  other : 
so  that  society  is  of  necessity  the  Divinely  unitary 
form  of  human  nature. 

But  now  what  is  the  bearing  of  the  definition 
of  human  nature  I  gave  in  my  last  letter,  upon  the 
doctrine  of  creation  regarded  as  the  regeneration  of 
that  nature?  Why,  as  I  conceive,  it  most  clearly 
brings  out  the  purely  spiritual  character  of  creation ; 
brings  it  out  indeed  with  an  emphasis  sufficient  to 
arrest  and  exalt  even  the  simplest  intelligence.  If 
human  nature,  as  we  have  seen,  possess  neither  moral 
nor  physical  quality,  save  by  implication,  that  is,  be 


PERSONALITY  THE  TRUE  GROUND  OF  UNBELIEF.    165 

neither  peTson  nor  thing :  if  on  the  contrary  it  be 
nothing  else  than  a  most  powerful  but  invisible  Di- 
vine bond  of  relationship  between  man  individual  and 
man  universal;  a  bond  moreover  so  free  and  elastic 
as  safely  to  permit  the  appropriation  of  a  private 
selfhood  to  man,  and  the  subsequent  expansion  of 
that  selfliood  even  to  diabolic  proportions  :  then  the 
only  philosophic  obstacle  to  the  recognition  of  crea- 
tion as  a  living  or  spiritual  work  of  God  disappears. 
That  is  to  say :  the  only  philosophic  hindrance  to 
men's  believing  in  God  as  a  creator,  is  their  ina- 
bility to  believe  in  themselves  as  created.  Self-con- 
sciousness, the  sentiment  of  personality,  the  feeling 
I  have  of  life  in  myself,  absolute  and  underived 
from  any  other  save  in  a  natural  way,  is  so  subtly 
and  powerfully  atheistic,  that  no  matter  how  loyally 
I  may  be  taught  to  insist  upon  creation  as  a  mere 
traditional  or  legendary  fact,  I  never  feel  inclined 
personally  to  believe  in  it,  save  as  the  fruit  of  some 
profound  intellectual  humiliation,  or  hopeless  inward 
vexation  of  spirit.  My  inward  ajjlatas  from  this 
cause  is  so  great,  I  am  conscious  of  such  super- 
abounding  personal  life,  that  I  am  satisfied,  for  my 
own  part  at  least,  that  my  sense  of  selfhood  must 
in  some  subtle  exquisite  way  find  itself  wounded  to 
death  —  find  itself  become  death  in  fact,  the  only 
death   I  am    capable    of  believing  in  —  before   any 


166      NATURAL  INCARNATION  THE  ONLY 

genuine   spiritual  resuscitation  is   at  all  practicable 
for  me. 

I  don't  say,  mind,  that  clmrcli  authority  is  not 
sufficient  to  make  us  ritually  acknowledge,  or  ac- 
knowledge with  the  lips,  creation  in  space  and  time. 
But  creation  in  space  and  time  is  intellectually 
absurd  or  preposterous,  and  this  is  all  that  our 
ritual  acknowledgments  are  good  for  in  the  long 
run,  to  make  some  absurd  or  incredible  thing  toler- 
able to  us.  We  are  talking  here  of  a  very  differ- 
ent creation,  that  is,  of  the  living  or  spiritual  crea- 
tion ;  and  what  I  say  is  that  the  sole  effectual 
hindrance  to  our  acknowledgment  of  this  is  the 
unhappy  conviction  to  which  we  are  ecclesiastically 
born  and  bred,  of  our  natural  realism,  of  our  being 
by  nature  veritable  existences.  Remember  what 
spiritual  creation  involves.  It  involves  the  giving 
things  phenomenal  existence  as  well  as,  or  in  order 
to,  real  being;  natural  substance  as  well  as,  or  in 
order  to,  spiritual  form.  In  other  words,  the  creator 
of  men  is  their  maker  also.  He  not  only  gives  his 
creatures  soul,  or  spiritual  life,  which  forever  indi- 
vidualizes them  from  all  other  things,  but  He  alone 
it  is  who  out  of  His  own  spiritual  substance  gives 
them  hodif  as  well,  that  is,  natural  existence,  which 
forever  identifies  them  with  all  other  things.  He 
does  this,  because  He,  himself,  constitutes  the  true 


METHOD  OF  SPIRITUAL  CREATION.  167 

and  quasi-\ita\  mother-substance  of  things,  or  fur- 
nishes, Himself,  the  natural  material  out  of  which 
they  are  fashioned.  This  is  the  adorable  difference 
of  creative  to  created  art.  No  artist  or  inventor 
amongst  us  ever  finds  the  mother-substance  or  ma- 
terial of  his  work  exclusively  within  himself,  or 
supplied  by  his  own  spiritual  resources.  He  finds 
it  already  provided  to  his  hand  by  nature,  and  all 
he  has  to  do  consequently  is  to  apply  ordinary  skill 
and  judgment  to  the  manipulation  of  this  material, 
in  order  that  his  work  may  duly  appear.  So  that 
unless  the  artist  or  inventor  had  first  some  natural 
community  with  these  lower  or  artificial  things  he 
makes  —  his  statue,  his  poem,  his  picture,  his  clock, 
his  house,  his  steam-engine,  his  what-not,  and  were 
himself,  to  begin  with,  the  fruit  of  a  most  spiritual 
Divine  art,  even  as  these  lower  things  are  a  fruit 
of  his  own  natural  art,  he  would  never  be  able  to 
conceive  them  even,  let  alone  execute  them.  Now 
the  creator  of  man  has,  to  begin  with,  no  such  com- 
munity of  nature  with  his  creature  as  this.  He  is 
not  a  subject  of  being,  but  its  unalterable  source, 
nor  is  He  capable  of  naturally  or  subjectively  exist- 
ing save  in  his  creature.  All  natural  or  subjec- 
tive existence  derives  from  Him  accordingly,  being 
nothing  else  but  that  instinctive  and  unconscious 
appropriation    and    imprisonment  of  His   most   holy 


168      NATURAL  INCARNATION  THE  ONLY 

substance,  which  is  involved  in  our  spiritual  con- 
sciousness, and  is  necessary  to  constitute  it.  And 
what  we  call  "  the  universe  of  nature,"  which  to  our 
unspiritual  imaginations  is  the  outward  sum  or  ob- 
jective truth  of  such  existence,  is  merely  an  artifice 
of  our  innocent  puerile  intelligence  to  hide  from  our 
own  eyes  our  dense  ignorance  of  the  fact,  and  so 
maintain  a  good  conceit  of  ourselves. 

Besides,  all  physical  existence  that  we  know  of  is 
plainly  specific  :  how  therefore  should  we  ever  feel 
ourselves  authorized  to  infer  that  there  was  some 
unknown  universal  substance  that  constituted  the 
invisible  generic  unity,  or  source,  of  all  these  in- 
numerable visible  species  ?  And  by  what  magic 
above  all  were  we  ever  taught  to  divine  that  the 
only  proper  name  to  bestow  upon  this  universal 
substance  was  the  indefinite  term  :  Nature  ?  There 
is  no  universal  mineral,  nor  vegetable,  nor  animal 
substance,  genus,  or  nature  answering  to  any  of 
these  specific  mineral,  vegetable,  or  animal  forms 
our  eyes  are  familiar  with  ;  and  there  is  even  express 
provision  made  in  the  moral  law,  as  we  shall  see  bye 
and  bye,  that  no  moral  subject  especially  shall  ever 
suggest  the  possibility  of  such  universality.  And  yet 
men  have  always  had  this  profoundly  philosophic 
instinct  of  the  underlying  unity  which  binds  together 
all  the  endlessly  diff'erent  and  hostile  forms  of  exist- 


METHOD   OF  SPIRITUAL  CREATION.  169 

ence  that  fall  within  the  compass  of  sense ;  and  have 
moreover  always  characterized  it  by  this  profoundly 
philosophic  because  purely  undefined  and  prophetic 
designation  —  Nature.  Whence  then  this  marvellous 
intellectual  instinct  ?  And  whence  this  equally  mar- 
vellous and  just  expression  of  it  ? 

Simply  from  the  infinite  craving  which  the  creator 
of  man  has  for  the  spiritual  sympathy  and  fellowship 
of  His  creatures;  they  themselves  being  both  alike 
a  providential  impulsion  within  the  unconscious  soul 
of  the  creature  to  bring  about  that  Divine  end.  For 
this  end  requires  for  its  own  fulfilment  a  preliminary 
process  of  purgation  in  the  created  nature :  requires 
that  all  the  forms  of  evil  and  falsity  to  which  the 
created  nature  is  subject,  by  reason  of  its  inherent 
alienation  from,  or  otherness  to,  the  infinite  creator, 
should  first  have  been  thoroughly  eliminated  or 
sloughed  ofi".  And  it  is  evident  that  these  abstract 
evils  and  falses  cannot  be  sloughed  off  until  they  have 
been  concentrated,  or  become  concrete  and  actual  in 
the  personality,  so  to  speak,  of  the  created  nature : 
that  is,  in  the  experience  of  the  various  persons  who 
derive  from  the  nature.  The  original  sin  of  the 
creature  —  his  irpcoTov  •x^euSo?  from  which  all  his  evils 
and  falses  flow  —  is  that  he  feels  himself  to  exist 
absoldehj ;  and  this  is  a  sin  he  may  w^ell  be  uncon- 
scious of,  since  the  boundless  love  of  his  creator  is  at 


170      NATURAL  INCARNATION  THE  ONLY 

the  bottom  of  it.  At  least  if  God  gave  himself  to  his 
creature  in  a  finite  manner,  there  could  be  no  danger 
of  the  sin  being  committed.  But  He  gives  himself  to 
the  creature  without  stint,  in  injinite  measure ;  and 
the  creature  cannot  help  feeling  therefore  that  he  is 
life  in  himself.  So  profoundly  unconscious  is  he  of 
falsifying  the  spiritual  truth  of  things  by  this  vicious 
estimate  of  himself,  that  here  after  six  thousand  years 
of  experience  scarcely  any  one  has  yet  attained  to 
right  ideas  upon  the  subject.  Above  all,  the  people 
vi^ho  preserve  the  outward  or  formal  revelation  of  the 
church's  long  fatuity  in  regard  to  it,  and  bestow  upon 
that  revelation  the  most  abundant  honor,  are  the  most 
densely  and  devoutly  blind  to  its  spiritual  signifi- 
cance :  and  one  would  sooner  expect  a  true  acknowl- 
edgment of  God  from  the  stones  in  the  street  than 
from  them. 

But  though  man  starts  with  this  feeling  of  his  own 
absoluteness,  or  of  his  being  life  in  himself,  he  is  by 
no  means  left  without  a  divine  witness  in  his  own 
bosom  to  the  profound  untruth  of  the  feeling.  For 
he  feels,  at  the  same  time  that  he  feels  his  existence, 
that  there  is  notldng  in  himself  to  loarrant  or  justify 
such  existence.  Let  him  start  then  never  so  gayly  in 
the  career  of  existence,  he  nevertheless  starts  with 
a  threatening  bombshell  in  his  very  vitals,  which  is 
ready  to  explode  and  lay  him  waste  every  moment 


METHOD   OF  SPIRITUAL  CREATION.  171 

that  he  remains  unreconciled  to  the  essential  truth  of 
things ;  or,  what  is  the  same  thing,  unenlightened  as 
to  the  essential  emptiness,  imbecility,  and  charlatanry 
he  carries  about  with  him  under  the  name  of  selfliood. 
Now  the  only  possible  way  of  his  becoming  recon- 
ciled to  the  absolute  truth  of  things  is,  to  give  over 
this  fallacious  feeling  of  his  constituting  his  own  life 
or  substance,  of  his  constituting  even  his  own  exist- 
ence or  selfhood,  inasmuch  as  this  fallacious  feeling 
itself  is  a  sheer  effect  of  spiritual  causes,  all  of  which 
have  their  being  in  God  most  High,  and  are  contin- 
gent upon  His  vast  designs  of  mercy  towards  the 
race.  And  in  order  that  his  reconciliation  may  be 
complete  or  perfect,  the  nature  or  quality  of  the  being 
which  all  spiritual  existence  has  in  God  most  High, 
becomes  reflected  to  his  experience  by  a  law  he  finds 
within  his  bosom  called  conscience,  the  whole  drift, 
spirit,  or  purport  of  which  is  that  he  love  his  neigh- 
bor as  himself.  For  only  in  this  way,  namely :  by  his 
coming  to  learn,  and  his  agreeing  to  act  upon,  the 
maxim,  that  the  being  which  alone  vitalizes  his  exist- 
ence is  spiritual,  not  material,  and  that  its  nature  is 
Love :  is  the  portentous  bombshell  which  he  bears 
about  in  himself  rendered  gradually,  and  at  last  per- 
fectly, inexplosive  and  harmless. 

Now  manifestly  the  inward  or  spiritual  disciplin- 
ing of  the  creature  to  this  divine  height,  demands  in 


172  NATURAL  INCARNATION  THE  ONLY 

order  to  base  it,  in  order  to  illustrate  and  enforce  it, 
some  answering  outward  or  natural  experience  on  his 
part;  demands  in  fact  the  literal  verification  of  his 
own  nature.  The  essential  freedom  and  rationality 
which  he  has  in  God  utterly  disquahfy  him  in  the 
long  run  for  receiving  truth  on  authority,  and  so  ren- 
der it  imperative  that  all  nutriment  intended  for  his 
spiritual  growth  be  capable  of  scientific  authentication 
—  that  is,  of  ultimating  itself  outwardly  or  to  his 
senses  —  before  he  can  assimilate  it.  In  short  his  in- 
ward or  spiritual  creation  and  culture  exact  a  strictly 
empirical,  conscious,  or  phenomenal  realm  of  existence 
on  the  creature's  part,  to  endow  him  with  true  self- 
knowledge,  that  is,  to  correct  the  conceit  and  igno- 
rance and  vanity  that  are  incident  to  his  private  or 
finite  generation,  and  so  inoculate  him  in  time  with 
the  chastening  and  otherwise  unattainable  knowl- 
edge and  love  of  God.  We  may  say  then  that  God's 
creative  purposes  towards  the  human  race  necessarily 
involve  a  long  preliminary  wrestle  or  tussle  on  the 
part  of  the  individual  or  self-conscious  man  loitli  him' 
self:  a  long,  toilsome,  most  bitter,  and  vexatious  con- 
flict on  his  part  Avith  his  own  puny,  crooked,  insincere 
and  ineffectual  ways  :  before  he  can  attain  to  that 
steadfast  peace  in  God,  which  shall  eventually  leave 
him  profoundly  disinterested,  indifferent,  and  actively 
inert  in  his  own  behalf. 


METHOD   OF  SPIRITUAL  CREATION.  173 


And  now,  my  friend,  I  wish  you  to  take  most  par- 
ticular notice :  that  this  provisional,  or  ancillary  and 
pedagogic  sphere  of  human  hfe  —  in  which  man  is 
thus  left  to  make  his  own  acquaintance,  and  to  be- 
come for  a  while  apparently  his  own  exclusive  guardian 
and  providence,  with  a  view  to  his  ultimate  and  inti- 
mate spiritual  disenchantment  with  himself  —  is  the 
world  of  our  actual  historic  consciousness,  the  loorld  of 
our  daily  experience  which  subjects  us  to  a  fixed  exist- 
ence in  space  and  time.  It  may  astonish  you  to  find 
any  definite  philosophic  rationale  assigned  to  this 
crazy  world  of  ours,  as  much  as  it  did  M.  Jourdain 
in  the  play  to  learn  that  he  had  been  talking  prose 
all  his  life  without  knowing  it;  but  that  this  and 
nothing  else  is  its  proper  function,  there  can  be  no 
doubt.  This  most  outward  and  lowest  of  all  worlds, 
in  which  space  and  time  have  a  fixed  and  not  a  fluid 
character  as  they  have  in  the  spiritual  world,  is  neces- 
sary to  the  development  and  training  of  om*  finite  con- 
sciousness ;  and  it  is  the  gradual  enlargement  of  this 
consciousness  of  ours  out  of  the  contemptible  personal 
limitations  in  which  it  begins,  into  the  largest  social 
dimensions  in  which  it  ends,  that  constitutes  the  sole 
veritable  stuff"  of  human  history.  AVhen  that  history 
has  attained  its  apogee,  accordingly,  and  not  before, 
we  may  expect  to  begin  the  realization  of  our  spiritual 
creation.     But  the  reason  of  my  asking  you  to  take 


174  HISTORY   NOTHING   ELSE  THAN   A 

particular  notice  of  the  fact  here  stated,,  was  that  I 
might  by  means  of  your  so  doing  the  better  impress 
upon  you  another  truth,  which  is :  that  what  we  call 
human  history  is  at  bottom  nothing  else  than  a  theatre  of 
Divine  revelation;  the  precise  historic  form  which 
the  revelation  takes  being  a  display  of  the  Divine 
dealino's  in  relation  to  human  nature.  The  initial 
acts  of  the  drama  reveal  God  in  a  state  of  appar- 
ently complete  prostration  to  the  created  nature,  so 
passively  subject  to  it,  as  to  be  blasphemed,  humili- 
ated, and  done  to  death  in  the  daily  chaos  of  its  self- 
ish and  malignant  passions  :  so  that  the  Divine  name 
sinks  at  last  into  a  mere  formula  of  execration  among 
men,  while  its  inherent  merciful  quality  is  almost 
wholly  forgotten.  But  the  later  scenes  of  the  as- 
tounding drama,  and  its  final  denoiiment,  show  Him 
spontaneously  rising  again  from  the  death  and  hell 
to  which  He  has  thus  been  consigned  in  the  persons 
of  the  created  nature,  and  exalting  the  nature  itself 
—  henceforth  discharged  of  personal  limitations,  or 
made  forever  social  and  unitary  —  into  the  intimate 
fellowship  of  His  own  eternal  being. 

The  truth  to  which  I  here  call  your  attention  is  of 
the  gravest  rational  import.  The  professing  Chris- 
tian church  is  too  baldly  avaricious  in  a  material 
sense,  and  is  moreover  too  instinct  spiritually  with 
rival  personal  ambitions,  and  rival  sectarian  emula- 


THEATRE  OF  DIVINE  EEVELATION.  175 

tions,  to  give  any  heed  to  it,  or  to  any  other  broadly 
human  question.  And  the  thin  scum  of  so-called 
liberal  or  radical  religionists  which  it  is  continually 
throwing  off,  seem  even  more  superficial  than  the 
church  itself  in  their  intellectual  tendencies,  for  they 
apparently  crave  no  deeper  satisfaction  to  their  pecul- 
iar religious  perplexities  than  science  deigns  to  min- 
ister. Above  all,  men  of  science  —  such  of  them 
especially  as  make  their  science  into  a  vehicle  and 
instrument  of  philosophizing  —  are  apt  quietly  to 
ignore  the  truth  of  a  spiritual  creation.  So  I  fore- 
warn you  that  you  will  not  find  yourself  in  a  crowded 
company,  if  you  consent  to  cultivate  the  truth.  Per- 
haps, however,  for  the  first  time  in  your  life,  you  will 
feel  yourself  able  en  revanche  to  breathe  to  the  full 
compass  of  your  freed  intellectual  lungs.  But  I  beg 
of  you,  if  you  have  any  dealing  with  this  truth  of  the 
rigidly  apocalyptic  character  of  the  world  in  which  we 
live,  to  deal  with  it  in  the  most  literal  unsentimental 
manner.  I  mean  exactly  what  I  say.  The  whole  use 
of  the  actual  world  is  to  mirror  or  reflect  Divine  reali- 
ties to  us,  as  much  so  as  the  whole  use  of  your  look- 
ing-glass is  to  mirror  or  reflect  your  physical  person  to 
your  own  eye.  And  it  mirrors  or  reflects  these  reali- 
ties to  us  in  coimection  strictly  with  our  own  nature 
in  contradistinction  from  our  proper  persons,  which 
are  only  and  at  best  a  factitious  and  perishable  seni- 


176  HISTORY  NOTHING   ELSE  THAN  A 

blance  or  phenomenon  of  the  nature.  So  that  the 
total  spiritual  or  philosophic  meaning  of  this  revela- 
tion is  to  declare  God  a  man  in  the  completest  sense 
of  the  word :  not  merely  a  spiritual  or  internal  man, 
infinite  in  love  and  vv^isdom,  but  much  more  a  natural 
man,  experienced  in  all  oiu*  appetites  and  passions, 
and  able  therefore  to  subjugate  every  densest  hell  of 
personality  in  our  nature  to  the  broadest  human  use. 
The  machinery,  spiritual  and  material,  by  which  this 
great  revelation  becomes  possible  and  effectual,  is  ex- 
plained with  great  industry  and  iteration  by  Sweden- 
borg,  in  all  his  books  more  or  less.  But  I  confess 
I  have  been  content  to  abide  in  the  full  spiritual  light 
of  the  revelation  itself,  without  taking  an  undue  or 
pedantic  interest  in  the  comparatively  dull  and  tedious 
recital  he  gives  of  the  methods  of  its  evolution. 

Cease  then  to  conceive  of  our  physical  and  moral 
existence  as  directly  implicated  either  in  our  spiritual 
Divine  creation  or  our  natural  Divine  redemption. 
They  are  only  indirectly  implicated  therein  as  furnish- 
ing us  that  secular  and  outside  knowledge  of  the  Di- 
vine ways  which  is  necessary  to  base  or  induct  our 
inward  or  spiritual  recognition  and  appreciation  of 
both  one  and  the  other.  Our  spiritual  creation  and 
our  natural  redemption  are,  both  alike,  a  purely  Di- 
vine and  miraculous  work,  transacted  within  the  un- 
conscious depths  of  our  nature;  so  that  neither  our 


THEATRE  OF  DIVINE  REVELATION.  177 

physical  existence  nor  our  moral  history  reflects  the 
least  original  light  upon  them,  their  only  active  func- 
tion being  servilely  to  symbolize  them  to  our  intelli- 
gence. How  absurd  then  to  expect  any  new  light 
from  the  physical  sciences,  now  so  much  cultivated, 
upon  the  questions  of  human  origin  and  human  des- 
tiny !  Neither  the  physical  nor  the  moral  world  con- 
stitutes the  true  sphere  of  our  life  or  being,  but  only 
of  our  factitious  seeming  or  appearance ;  and  the  more 
satisfied  we  are  with  the  knowledge  they  impart  to 
us,  the  more  hopelessly  remote  are  we  from  spiritual 
insight  or  perception.  This  phenomenal  world  in 
which  we  live  is  the  world  not  of  Divine  reality,  but 
of  Divine  revelation ;  and  he  whose  knowledge  of  it 
is  greatest  vindicates  his  superiority  to  his  brethren 
only  in  boasting  a  larger  familiarity  with  shadows. 
I  am  surprised  that  a  person  of  your  intellectual  pith 
should  be  so  easily  duped  by  the  airs  of  our  scientific 
scepticism.  Do  you  think  it  fair  to  deny  the  Divine 
being  and  existence,  because  science  can  discover  no 
trace  of  them  throughout  the  wide  realm  of  physics  ? 
If  so,  it  can  only  be  because  you  are  speculatively 
blind  to  any  higher  realm  of  being  than  that  of 
physics.  At  all  events  your  need  to  believe  in  God 
is  vastly  less  sensitive  than  mine.  For  my  part  I 
should  unfeignedly  thank  science  for  its  negative  dis- 
covery, simply  because  it  brought  the  Divine  exist- 


178  SPIRITUAL  VALUE  OF  MIRACLE 

ence  nearer  to  my  own  nature,  or  approximately 
humanized  Him.  I  confess  I  should  have  an  invol- 
untary or  inveterate  shrinking  from  science,  if  it  found 
any  direct  attestation  of  God  in  mineral,  vegetable,  or 
animal  existence,  much  more  any  unmistakable  traces 
of  Plis  habitat  in  the  mechanism  of  the  celestial  spaces. 
For  I  should  find  it  hard  to  persuade  myself  that  a 
being  who  had  any  direct  sympathy  with  either  of 
those  low  and  servile  fields  of  existence  could  be  pos- 
sessed of  any  intimate  human  quality. 

All  this  will  remind  you  of  the  intellectual  value 
I  attribute  to  miracle  in  the  evolution  of  our  race- 
history.  For  in  the  absence  of  it,  there  would  have 
been  nothing  to  suggest  or  authenticate  to  the  univer- 
sal heart  and  mind  of  the  race  the  infinite  and  ador- 
able name  of  God,  nor  consequently  any  power  to 
resist  the  incessant  scientific  debasement  of  our  indi- 
vidual intelligence  to  mere  nature-worship  at  most. 
For  miracle  is  only  a  brute  affii-mation  or  attestation 
of  the  creative  infinitude  to  men's  brute  or  undevel- 
oped spiritual  intelligence,  and  has  been  full  there- 
fore of  the  tenderest  and  most  timely  Divine  pity. 
That  we  happen  to  have  outgrown  its  need  at  this 
day,  and  can  intellectually  dispense  with  it,  has  been 
owing  to  no  diminution  of  the  creative  benignity,  but 
rather  to  a  practical  enlargement  of  its  scope,  in  wid- 
ening the  sphere  of  man's  freedom  and  rationality  to 


AS  A  SCIENTIFIC  IRRITANT.  179 


such  an  extent,  as  effectually  to  deliver  him  hence- 
forth from  the  dominion  of  great  names,  or  of  routine 
and  authority,  in  scientific  as  well  as  in  spiritual  or 
sacred  things,  and  thus  make  him  over  at  long  last  to 
the  inspiration  of  the  unimpeded  Divine  Good  in  the 
form  of  our  own  glorified  flesh  and  bones.  We  may 
say  in  fact  that  without  miracles  as  a  perpetual  re- 
minder of  a  supersensuous  life  in  us,  the  intellect 
must  have  lost  its  highest  Divine  charm  which  is 
that  of  freedom,  or  inward  inspiration,  and  have  in- 
continently succumbed  to  the  limitations  of  science 
which  forever  enchain  it  to  sense.  Every  intellect  the 
least  spiritualized  is  now  free  to  assert  its  just  insub- 
ordination to  the  senses,  or  claim  to  be  wholly  un- 
inspired by  science.  And  I  maintain  that  it  owes  this 
freedom  solely  to  the  long  respect  entertained  among 
men  for  miracle  as  a  distinctively  Divine  mode  of 
action.  For  without  miracle  to  serve  as  a  symbol 
of  the  otherwise  unrecognized  creative  infinitude  to 
us  until  such  time  as  the  intellect  itself  should  re- 
volt from  the  worthless  symbol  in  the  interest  of  its 
own  living  Divine  substance,  men  would  never  have 
dreamt  of  ascribing  a  present  reality  to  creation,  but 
have  been  content  to  regard  it  as  a  past,  or  outward 
historic  fact  merely,  intrinsically  incapable  therefore  of 
arousing  any  deeper  intellectual  homage  in  us  than 
that  of  our  servile  and  dead  memory. 


LiETTER     XV. 


W^^MfY  DEAR  FRIEND:  — We  have  dwelt 
long  enough  on  general  principles :  it  is 
time  we  begin  to  make  some  particular 
application  of  them. 
We  have  seen  in  recent  letters  that  human  nature 
is  not  the  least  physical,  but  on  the  contrary  strictly 
metaphysical,  involving  physics  simply  as  its  organic 
or  material  base,  in  order  to  fix  it,  or  give  it  anchor- 
age. And  you,  yourself,  doubtless,  will  be  as  prompt 
as  I  am  to  infer  hereupon,  that  we  men  —  in  whom 
this  organic  or  finite  base  of  existence  almost  com- 
pletely controls  its  distinctly  natural  and  infinite 
possibilities  —  have  small  claim  to  be  considered  in 
our  own  right  apt  specimens  of  human  nature.  Thus 
far,  in  fact,  I  think  we  may  be  said  to  furnish  only 
good  negative  specimens  of  it;  that  is,  to  furnish 
much  better  evidence  of  what  the  nature  is  not,  than 
of  what  it  is.  We  constitute  hardly  anything  more 
as  yet  than  the  underground  phenomenal  basement 


HUMAN  NATURE  vs.  THE  HUMAN  PERSON.         181 

floor  of  the  majestic  human  house  God  is  uprearing 
in  our  nature  —  a  basement  floor  dug  deep  in  min- 
eral, vegetable,  and  animal  substance  —  and  he  would 
sadly  err,  accordingly,  who  should  look  upon  us  as 
the  celestial  superstructure  itself.  And  being  but 
this  material  base  of  om'  nature,  we  have  no  more 
pretension  of  course  to  constitute  its  living  or  spirit- 
ual personality,  than  the  metals  which  enter  into  the 
material  structure  of  a  watch  have  to  constitute  the 
functional  power  so  named.  I  have  already  shown 
you,  indeed,  that  human  nature  —  being  bipolar, 
having  two  factors,  one  creative  or  infinite,  the  other 
created  or  finite  —  involves  a  hopeless  contradiction, 
an  inextricable  puzzle,  for  every  one  born  subject  to 
it,  and  can  only  be  integrally  constituted  therefore 
in  a  perfectly  unitary  personality,  or  one  which  shall 
do  exact  and  equal  justice  to  both  of  its  extreme 
factors.  In  short,  human  nature  is  normally  con- 
stituted only  in  the  person  of  God-Man. 

Thus  if  Jesus  Christ  had  never  actually  lived,  the 
necessities  of  our  thought  would  have  driven  us  to 
invent  him.  At  the  same  time  I  don't  wonder  that 
so  many  people  at  this  day,  who  seem  to  me  more 
or  less  tinctured  with  his  spirit,  are  grievously  per- 
plexed to  connect  that  spirit  with  the  aims  lent  by 
professing  Christians  to  the  Christian  name.  The 
Christian  spirit,  as  represented  by  those  who  make 


182  THE  CHURCH,   THE  MAIN   CITADEL 

a  formal  or  visible  profession  of  it,  is  at  most  and 
altogether  a  personal  spirit.  It  may  have  incident- 
ally, to  be  sure,  more  or  less  benignant  issues  to 
human  life  associated  with  it,  but  these  issues  are 
purely  incidental :  the  main  or  direct  tendency  of  this 
pseudo-Christian  spirit  is  to  deepen  the  sense  of  per- 
sonality in  men,  and  modify  it  in  the  way  of  rendering 
it  more  and  more  consonant  with  the  Divine  will. 
The  theory  of  the  church  seems  to  be  that  God's  pur- 
pose in  creation  is :  not,  all  simply,  to  form  a  heaven 
out  of  the  human  race,  and  make  history  infallibly 
conduce  to  that  supreme  end  in  becoming  ever  more 
and  more  a  grand  school  of  discipline  for  humanity, 
in  which  men,  taught  by  a  profound  experience  of 
the  evils  of  self-love  and  love  of  the  world,  may  at 
last  become  naiurally  or  spontaneously  roused  to  react 
against  these  evils,  and  freely  incline  instead  to  the 
promotion  and  culture  of  a  race-sentiment  in  hu- 
manity, which  has  no  practical  admixture  of  evil  and 
falsity  in  it  to  betray  and  defeat  their  devotion :  but 
to  form  hoik  a  heaven  and  a  hell  out  of  the  human 
race,  leaving  it  strictly  optional  with  every  indi- 
vidual to  determine  himself  to  either  of  these  oppo- 
site poles,  but  allowing  him  no  chance,  when  once 
his  choice  is  made,  of  ever  after  correcting  it.  The 
revolting  hideousness  of  ascribing  such  a  purpose 
to  the  merciful  Creator  of  helpless,  dependent  men, 


OF  EXISTING  EVIL   AND  FALSITY.  183 

you  are  as  quick  to  discern  as  I  am,  and  I  need 
not  dwell  upon  it.  But  I  want  you  clearly  to  under- 
stand that  these  diabolic  audacities  and  blasphemies 
which  men  theoretically  allow  themselves  with  refer- 
ence to  the  Divine  name,  essentially  inhere  in  our  in- 
sane habit  of  regarding  human  life  as  personally 
and  not  as  socially  constituted,  and  attest  the  neces- 
sarily perverse  interpretation  which  that  insane  habit 
leads  us  to  impose  upon  every  form  of  Divine  truth. 

Dear  friend,  if  men  could  but  once  livingly  swing 
free  of  these  personal  implications  in  their  thoughts 
and  aspirations  towards  God :  that  is  to  say,  if  they 
could,  even  for  a  moment,  spiritually  feel  themselves 
as  no  longer  visible  or  cognizable  to  God  in  their 
atomic  individualities,  but  only  as  so  many  social 
units,  each  embracing  and  enveloping  all  in  affec- 
tion and  thought :  the  work  would  be  forever  done, 
as  it  seems  to  me.  Heaven  would  be  begun  on 
earth,  and  the  very  nature  of  man  reflect  or  repro- 
duce at  last  the  lineaments  of  Divine  good.  But 
what  hope  of  this  is  there  within  the  precincts  of 
the  Church  at  all  events,  where  men  are  expressly 
taught  that  the  only  imaginable  theory  of  Christ's 
office  is  to  save  men  in  their  individual  persons, 
or  their  piddling  private  capacities,  and  not  at  all 
as  a  nature  or  race ;  and  consequently  that  their 
only  chance  of  salvation  at  his  hands  lies  in  their 


184  CLAIM   OF  A  PERSONAL  INTEREST 

diligently  and  impudently  * "  appropriating  "  him, 
every  one  to  his  worthless  and  insignificant  little  self. 
As  if  Christ  could  be  in  any  sense  a  jjcrsonal  pos- 
session of  men,  to  be  made  theirs  by  some  cheap 
and  odious  methodistic  mouthing  of  his  name,  and 
afterwards  to  be  paraded  as  an  ornament  on  their 
sleeve  to  dazzle  the  eyes  of  harmless  worldlings 
who  still  have  modesty  and  grace  enough  left 
thoroughly  to  disoww  him !  If  these  thoughtless 
Christian  sectaries  of  ours  could  once  be  led  to  sus- 
pect that  "  our  Lord,"  as  they  vulgarly  call  him,  is 
the  veritable  and  only  great  God  almighty  himself 
in  men's  natural  lineaments  —  the  spiritual  father 
therefore  of  all  mankind,  especially  of  those  who  in 
their  own  conceit  are  hopelessly  remote  from  Him, 
I  wonder  whether  the  discovery  would  arouse  them 
at  last  to  a  sense  of  spiritual  awe  and  reverence,  or 
whether  all  spiritual  possibilities  are  not  effectively 
drowned  out  for  them  under  this  rubbish  of  ritual 
righteousness  with  which  they  affect  to  be  clad.  The 
inmost  life  and  sanity  of  my  oAvn  faith  in  God  de- 
pend upon  my  feeling  myself  incapable  of  any  per- 
sonal or  outside  relation  to  Him,  because  the  bare 
thought  of  such  a  relation  as  possible  between  us 
is  the  menace  of  death  to  my  soul.  And  this  is  the 
reason  why  I  cling  with  even  a  passionate  intellect- 
ual gratitude  to  the  revelation  of  the  Divine  name 


IN  CHRIST  PREPOSTEROUS,  185 

in  Jesus  Christ,  because  he  alone  in  history  shows 
me  the  Divine  infinitude  or  perfection  actually  blent 
or  identified,  in  his  dying  and  risen  person,  with 
human  nature  —  my  own  natiu-e  as  man  —  and  so 
forever  disenthralls  me  to  my  own  consciousness 
from  the  pungent  damnation  wrapped  up  in  my  own 
odious  and  imbecile  selfhood. 

Swedenborg's  books  throw  a  flood  of  light  upon 
the  method  of  this  ineffable  Divine  achievement  in 
our  history,  and  you  are  so  blessedly  free  of  ecclesi- 
astical biases  that  I  see  no  reason  why  you  should 
not  read  them  with  a  profit  and  pleasure  equal  to  my 
own.     There  may  be  some  reason,  unknown  to  me, 
blinding  you  to  the  honest  intellectual  charm  of  the 
books;   perhaps,   like   many  others,  you  have  been 
prejudiced  against  them  by  the  obvious  fact  that  they 
have  been  hitherto  engineered,  not  in   the  interest 
of  mankind,  but  exclusively  in  that  of  a  low  sectarian 
ambition,   or  lust  of  ecclesiastical  self-righteousness. 
But  surely  after  the  many  lessons  the  Christian  eccle- 
siasticisms  have  taught  us,  of  the  inevitable  deprava- 
tion Christ's  spirit  is  bound  to  undergo  whenever  the 
attempt  is  made  to  reproduce  it  in  corporate  form, 
you  would  not  hold  the  upright  old  Swedenborg  him- 
self answerable  for  this  helpless  betrayal  of  his  truth 
on  the  part  of  his  professed  followers,  would  you? 
If  any  obvious  prejudice  of  this  sort  really  threaten 


186  SWEDENBORG'S  DOCTRINE  OF  THE 

to  cut  you  off  from  the  immense  benefit  Swedenborg's 
books  bring  to  the  intellect,  let  me  briefly  assure  you 
that  they  themselves  are  infinitely  remote  from  sug- 
gesting to  an  unperverted  mind  any  of  these  shallow 
—  and,  as  we  may  say  at  this  day,  profligate  —  ec- 
clesiastical conceptions.  Swedenborg  indeed  of  good 
set  purpose  finds  very  much  to  say  of  the  church 
both  "  old "  and  "  new,"  and  he  says  it  all  without 
a  shadow  of  reticence  or  apology,  as  if  he  never 
doubted  that  every  one  who  came  to  his  books  would 
be  thoroughly  vastated  of  sectarian  aspirations,  and 
incapable  therefore  of  supposing  him  such  an  ass  as 
to  represent  God  almighty  solicitous  only  to  establish 
under  the  name  of  "  new "  church  a  more  baldly 
vicious  and  contemptible  ecclesiasticism  than  any 
that  had  ever  yet  cursed  the  burdened  and  patient 
earth.  What  then  is  his  general  doctrine  of  the 
constitution  of  the  church,  as  shadowed  forth  in 
sacred  or  symbolic  history? 

This  doctrine  cannot  be  at  all  understood,  unless 
we  previously  take  into  consideration  the  state  of 
things  in  which  it  is  grounded,  namely :  that  the 
world  in  lohich  the  church  exists,  and  for  whose  bene- 
fit it  is  a  spiritual  provision,  is  essentially  a  sphere 
of  Divine  revelation :  while  at  the  same  time  it  is 
profoundly  ignored  by  the  world,  or  those  who  in- 
habit it,  that  it  is  charged  with  any  such  universal 


CONSTITUTION  OF  THE  CHURCH.  187 

function.  The  world  has  indeed  no  faintest  suspicion 
of  the  truth,  that  it  exists  for  nothing  else  but  to 
constitute  an  orderly  revelation  of  God's  spiritual 
infinitude  or  perfection ;  but  stupidly  settles  down 
to  the  far  more  flattering  conviction,  that  it  consti- 
tutes on  the  contrary  a  most  real  and  permanent 
Divine  work,  a  work  of  true  and  finished  creation, 
and  this  in  spite  of  its  being  destitute  of  every  spirit- 
ual Divine  mark.  Now  the  church  was  intended  to 
be  a  standing  witness  or  memorial  of  God  amidst 
this  prevalent  ignorance  of  men  concerning  Him.  It 
is  a  candle  irradiating  by  its  feeble  but  honest  glim- 
mer the  otherwise  unmixed  and  hopeless  darkness. 
Swedenborg  accordingly  views  the  chm-ch  throughout 
its  entire  history  in  the  lif/ht  of  a  Divine  drama,  pre- 
figuring to  the  refiective  understanding  of  men  —  who 
are  inwardly  callous  to  the  most  tender  and  spiritual 
Divine  substance  latent  in  their  own  coarse  souls  and 
bodies,  and  outwardly  therefore  unobservant  of  it  — 
in  certain  symbolic  or  representative  persons  and  peo- 
ples, the  entire  and  signally  miraculous  truth  upon  the 
subject  of  mans  Divine  nature  and  destiny.  About 
the  prehistoric  beginnings  of  the  church  indeed  he 
is  naturally  able  to  give  us  very  little  information, 
since  the  greatest  amount  of  such  information  could 
only  conduce  to  the  satisfaction  of  a  purely  idle 
curiosity.     But  he  shows  that  it  grew  out  of  a  very 


188  STATEMENTS  IN  REGARD 

tender  and  infantile  spiritual  intelligence  in  man, 
scarce  weaned  as  yet  from  Nature's  maternal  bosom ; 
and  that  this  intelligence  accordingly  was  wholly 
made  up  of  a  perception  of  the  interior  correspond- 
ence that  obtains  between  spirit  and  nature,  that  is, 
between  celestial  goods  and  their  derivative  terrestrial 
truths.  That  the  peculiar  quality  of  this  intelligence, 
however,  was  very  exalted,  being  inspired  by  the 
heart,  appears  from  all  he  specifically  says  of  it, 
and  especially  from  a  brief  but  pregnant  incidental 
glimpse  he  gives  of  its  broadly  human  genius  and 
sympathies,  in  a  remark  he  makes  about  the  church 
called  Adam,  with  which  our  sacred  or  symbolic 
scripture  opens,  and  of  which  he  saw  the  spiritual 
or  heavenly  state.  He  says  :  "  Those  who  belonged 
to  the  most  ancient  church,  designated  by  the  name 
of  Man  or  Adam,  are  above  the  head  in  the  Maxi- 
mus  Homo,  and  dwell  together  in  the  utmost  happi- 
ness. They  told  me  that  it  is  seldom  others  come 
to  them,  except  such  occasionally  as  come,  not  from 
this  earth  but,  as  they  phrased  it, from  the  universe."* 
The  men  of  this  church  in  fact  "  were  internal  men, 
delighted  only  with  internal  things,"  which  are  the 
things  of  Love  and  Wisdom,  "  and  viewing  external 
things  only  with  their  eyes,  while  they  reflected  upon 
the  spiritual  goods  and  truths  they  represented.    Thus 

*  Arcana  delestia,  1115. 


TO  THE  PREHISTORIC  CHURCH.  189 

external  things  were  held  of  no  intellectual  account 
by  them,  save  as  leading  them  to  reflect  on  internal 
things,  and  these  in  their  turn  to  reflect  on  celestial 
things,  and  these  again  on  the  Lord,  who  to  them 
was  all  in  all."  * 

It  is  very  difficult,  I  admit,  to  do  any  justice  with 
our  inspissated  spiritual  faculty  to  Swedenborg's  de- 
scriptions of  this  early  or  internal  development  of  the 
church  in  man.  They  suggest  to  om'  coarser  intel- 
lectual fibre  a  very  much  feebler  grasp  upon  life  than 
our  own,  and  it  even  disconcerts  us  to  imagine  the 
truth  otherwise.  To  the  cultivated  or  regenerate 
heart,  however,  this  intellectual  judgment  of  ours,  no 
doubt,  seems  very  profane  or  sensuous ;  very  much 
as,  to  the  conmion  heart,  a  judgment  which  should 
affirm  the  superior  sweetness  of  the  adult  man  to  the 
infant  child  would  appear  little  short  of  sacrilegious. 
Anyhow  the  state  of  things  here  described  was  very 
incongruous  with  the  Divine  designs  in  humanity, 
for  man  then,  as  Swedenborg  says,  was  more  like 
a  spii'it  than  a  man,  and  the  Divine  design  could 
be  fulfilled  only  by  making  him  flesh.  "  For  in  this 
way  only  could  celestial  and  spiritual  life  be  adjoined 
to  mans  proper  nature  y  that  they  might  be  as  onc."t 

Swedenborg  accordingly  proceeds  to  represent  the 

*  Arcana  Ccelestia,  54. 
t  Ibid.  160. 


190  INNOCENCE  OF  A  NATURAL 

descendants  of  the  church,  thus  styled  Adam  or  Man, 
as  incHning  to  selfhood:  that  is,  desiring  to  become 
instead  of  an  internal  man  an  external  one.  But 
he  does  not  fail  to  characterize  this  change  of  genius 
in  it,  though  relatively  unfortunate  of  course,  since 
everything  deteriorates  in  proportion  as  it  becomes 
remote  from  its  source,  yet  as  by  no  means  absolutely 
so;  inasmuch  as  selfhood,  though  regarded  in  itself 
or  absolutely  it  is  unmixed  evil,  is  yet  the  indis- 
pensable condition  of  man's  natural  development,  or 
race-evolution,  and  consequently  of  that  redemptive 
achievement  in  our  nature  which  constitutes  God's 
true  or  eternal  spiritual  glory  in  creation.  This 
rising  inclination  to  selfhood  is  the  inevitable  dawn 
of  the  natural  or  race-mind  in  us,  and  as  such  of 
course  is  noway  evil,  though  vieived  apart  from  that 
subordination  it  is  the  fountain  of  all  the  evil  known 
to  the  universe.  We  don't  get  angry  with  the  infant, 
although  we  feel  bound  in  the  interests  of  his  own 
maturity  to  correct  him,  when  we  see  him  instinc- 
tively exhibiting  the  traits  of  his  future  natural  man- 
hood; on  the  contrary  we  are  secretly  diverted  by 
his  arch  and  graceful  Avays  of  self-assertion,  because 
as  yet  they  are  full  of  innocence  or  innocuous.  Ex- 
actly so  we  may  say  there  is  no  ground  for  moral 
disapprobation  in  these  nascent  or  unconscious  ego- 
tistic inclinations  on  the  part  of  the  early  church. 


INCLINATION  TO  SELFHOOD.  191 

because  to  the  wiser  mind  they  simply  foretell  the 
advent  in  the  fulness  of  time  of  the  Divine  natural 
humanity,  and  are  themselves  meanwhile  full  of  in- 
fantile ignorance  and  innocence. 

Indeed  Swedenborg  always  draws  a  wide  dis- 
tinction between  the  natural  love  of  self  and  the 
world,  and  an  absolute  or  unnatural  love  of  them,  that 
is,  a  love  of  them  for  their  own  sakes ;  calling  the 
former  a  wise  love,  and  the  latter  a  stupid  or  insane 
one.  He  says  for  example  in  his  profoundly  clear  and 
beautiful  Essay  upon  the  Divine  Love  and  Wisdom, 
of  which  Lippincott  published  an  extremely  good 
translation  by  Mr.  Foster  eight  or  ten  years  ago,  and 
which,  if  you  are  interested  in  what  I  say,  I  recom- 
mend you  to  get :  "The  loves  of  self  and  of  the  world 
are  hy  creation  heavenly  loves,  because  they  are  loves 
of  the  natural  man  subservient  to  spiritual  loves,  in 
the  same  way  that  foundations  are  subservient  to 
houses.  These  natural  loves  guarantee  a  man's  wish- 
ing well  to  his  own  body,  desiring  food,  raiment,  and 
shelter,  consulting  the  welfare  of  his  family,  seeking 
after  useful  occupation,  and  even  after  honors  pro- 
portionate to  the  worth  of  the  public  trusts  he  fulfils, 
and  the  extent  of  the  fulfilment  he  renders  them; 
and  guarantee  moreover  his  enjoying  worldly  pleas- 
ures, and  finding  delight  and  refreshment  in  them : 
but  now  mind !  our  natural  loves  guarantee  all  these 


192  UNHANDSOME  PRE-NATAL 

things,  not  at  all  for  any  absolute  or  unconditional 
worth  to  be  found  in  them,  for  there  is  no  such 
worth,  but  for  a  certain  end  of  use  which  they  pro- 
mote in  rendering  a  man  fit  to  serve  the  Lord  and 
serve  the  neighbor.  But  where  this  use  is  not  pro- 
moted, as  in  the  case  of  a  man  who  has  no  relish  for 
serving  the  Lord  or  his  neighbor,  but  only  for  serving 
himself  by  means  of  the  world,  then  his  natural  self- 
love  ceases  to  be  heavenly  and  becomes  infernal,  be- 
cause it  cuts  the  man  off  from  delighting  in  his 
nature  or  kind,  and  shuts  him  up,  spiritually,  to  his 
own  selfhood,  which  is  wholly  evil."  * 

Swedenborg  goes  on  to  give  his  readers  a  detailed 
mention  of  the  specific  churches  that  succeeded  to 
this  Adamic  one,  with  the  several  characteristics 
that  made  each  of  them  noticeably  distinct  from 
its  predecessors.  These  details  are  excessively  te- 
dious and  uninteresting  at  this  day,  though  to  future 
inquirers  into  our  distinctively  race  -  genesis  they 
may  prove  perhaps  exhilarating ;  and  I  have  not 
the  least  intention  of  dwelling  upon  them.  They 
were  churches  still  in  the  gristle,  unclad  as  yet  with 
natural  flesh  and  bone,  and  devoid  therefore  of  proper 
historic  interest,  so  far  at  least  as  indicating  any  con- 
structive providential  purpose  in  human  nature ;  be- 
ing based  every  one  of  them  upon  some  mere  diver- 

*  Divine  Love  and  Wisdom.     See  also  Ath.  Creed,  43. 


DEVELOPMENTS  OF  THE  CHURCH.       193 

gent  relation  in  the  personal  genius  of  its  founders 
with  respect  to  every  other  that  preceded  it,  and  des- 
tined like  them  to  be  engulfed  in  some  more  general 
form  which  should  round  them  all  off  into  visible 
unity.  I  suppose  it  is  all  very  exact  church-physi- 
ology, but  I  confess  I  feel  little  or  no  interest  in  the 
very  unhandsome  pre-natal  physiological  development 
of  the  church,  while  it  was  still  an  immature  and  un- 
born providential  embryo  in  the  earth,  peopling  it  too 
with  every  uncouth,  unclean,  and  monstrous  form  of 
life  below  the  human.  And  even  after  it  has  attained 
to  fully  formed  consciousness  of  itself  as  man,  and 
separates  itself  from  whatsoever  is  not-man,  it  awak- 
ens no  philosophic  interest  save  as  it  tends,  by  uncon- 
scious copulation  with  the  world,  to  generate  what 
men  subsequently  recognize  as  himan  nature.  Ac- 
cordingly I  shall  only  attempt  to  give  you  a  con- 
densed philosophic  apercit  of  the  ever-growing  corrup- 
tion of  the  early  churches,  until  that  corruption  finally 
culminated,  or  became  a  momentous  historic  phenom- 
enon, in  the  gross  fanatical  lineaments  of  the  Jewish 
theocracy  :  certainly  from  a  spiritual  point  of  view  the 
most  complete  and  comprehensive  embodiment  of  un- 
godliness ever  Divinely  consecrated  in  human  annals. 
But  the  only  result  of  this  philosophic  glimpse  will 
be,  I  hope,  to  suggest  afresh  to  your  mind  what  an 
adorable  wonder-worker  Ave  have  in  Him  who  thus 


194  CREATION  ESSENTIALLY  MIRACULOUS. 

utilizes,  or  turns  to  the  advantage  of  human  nature, 
the  inmost  and  most  implacable  evil  of  its  individ- 
ual bosoms,  making  it  indeed  the  fertile  womb  of 
infinite  and  otherwise  inconceivable  Divine  and  hu- 
man good. 


LETTER     XVI. 


T  DEAR  FRIEND  -.  —  To  say  as  Sweden- 
borg  says  :  that  this  early  church  called 
Adam  or  man  inclined  to  selfhood,  or  from 
internal  tended  to  become  external :  is  mani- 
festly equivalent  to  saying  that  it  lost  sight  of  the  only 
reason  it  had  for  existing,  namely  :  the  service  it  might 
do  the  iDorld  in  keeping  it  mindful  of  God :  and  began 
to  value  itself  on  its  own  account,  as  if  it  had  existed 
ab  origine  for  its  own  sake,  and  were  itself  an  absolute 
Divine  good  in  the  earth. 

The  original  bias  to  evil  in  the  human  heart,  or 
what  separates  it  from  God,  is  constituted  by  self- 
love  and  love  of  the  world.  But  these  loves  are 
not  in  themselves  evil,  but  innocent  and  heavenly, 
because  they  are  purely  instinctive  or  organic  loves 
in  man  serviceable  to  spiritual  loves,  just  as  foun- 
dations are  serviceable  to  houses.  "Eor  from  these 
loves,"  say  Swedenborg,  "  man  wishes  well  to  his 
body,    desires   to   be   fed,   clad,    lodged,    to   consult 


196        OUR  SELFISH  AND  WORLDLY  LOVES  MADE  EVIL 

the  comfort  of  his  family,  to  seek  after  useful  em- 
ployment, yes,  to  be  honored  for  the  worth  of  the 
services  he  thus  renders  to  society,  and  also  to  be 
dehghted  and  recreated  by  the  pleasures  of  the 
world :  but  all  these  for  a  certain  spiritual  end, 
which  ought  to  be  use,  for  by  these  loves  thus  ex- 
ercised and  refreshed  he  is  fitted  to  serve  the  Lord 
and  the  neighbor.  But  when  these  loves  refuse  to 
become  subservient  to  more  universal  loves,  as  Di- 
vine and  neighborly  love,  they  then  become  infer- 
nal, because  they  then  immerse  a  man's  mind  and 
soul  in  selfhood,  which  in  itself  is  all  evil."* 
In  course  of  time  then  these  wholesome  imper- 
sonal loves  are  sure  to  lose  their  innocence  or  be- 
come personal  by  being  made  to  minister  to  self- 
hood in  man,  or  promote  the  interests  of  his  falla- 
cious individuality  as  against  those  of  his  common 
nature.  In  other  words  all  men  in  time  become 
selfish  and  worldly,  that  is,  unduly  addicted  to  the 
love  of  themselves  and  the  love  of  the  world.  This 
natural  degeneracy  of  mankind  is  not  fatal  by  any 
means,  but  it  calls  aloud  for  God's  redemptive 
power  in  human  nature  to  save  the  race  from  pre- 
mature blight.  Neither  selfishness  nor  Avorldliness 
will  ever  be  considered  obsolete  forms  of  human 
nature,   but   they   will   always   be   considered   more 

*  Arcana  Ccelestia,  396.     See  also  Ath.  Creed,  43. 


BY  THE  INFLUENCE  OF  PROPRIUM.  197 

and  more  disreputable  or  unworthy  forms  of  it. 
They  will  always  drive  men  of  spiritual  culture  to 
desire  to  realize  their  nature  in  social  or  Divinely- 
r^eemed  form,  but  they  will  never  have  power 
actually  to  deprive  any  one  of  hope  towards  God. 
As  long  indeed  as  animals  and  vegetables  continue 
to  exist  man  will  scarcely  be  robbed  of  his  God- 
ward  faith  and  hope  by  any  amount  of  selfishness 
or  worldliness,  for  the  animal  is  a  very  innocent 
and  unconscious  type  of  the  former  love,  and  the 
vegetable  of  the  latter.  Until  God  sends  an  utter 
blight  upon  the  life  of  the  animal  and  vegetable 
kingdoms  therefore  we  shall  feel  no  misgivings 
about  His  intimate  dealings  with  our  own  nature. 
What  is  worldliness  at  bottom?  We  all  know  well 
enough  what  it  is  in  a  literal  or  moral  aspect  —  as 
separating  between  man  and  man;  for  we  all  love 
the  world  too  much,  and  sometimes  sacrifice  our 
neighbor's  esteem,  and  our  own  peace  of  mind,  to 
its  tempting  pleasures,  honors,  or  emoluments.  But 
Avhat  does  worldliness  mean  in  a  spiritual  rather 
than  a  moral  aspect,  that  is,  as  separating  no  longer 
between  man  and  man,  but  between  man  and  God  ? 
It  means  to  esteem  and  love  the  world  as  a  final- 
ity, to  be  satisfied  with  it  as  a  fulfilment  of  our 
hopes  and  aspirations  towards  God:  thus  it  means 
at   bottom   to  ignore   God,  to  ignore  His    spiritual 


198  THE  EXCESS  OF  THEM  EVEN  NOT  HATEFUL  TO  GOD, 

perfection,  or  His  essential  infinity  and  eternity,  and 
acknowledge  Him  at  the  most  as  a  physical  and 
moral  power,  the  creator  and  maker  of  this  realm 
of  finite  personal  existence.  When  the  worldliag 
acknowledges  God  at  all,  this  is  the  extreme  limit 
of  the  homage  he  renders  Him:  he  considers  Him 
as  the  author  of  the  very  pleasant  life  that  now  is, 
the  giver  of  every  good  and  perfect  gift  to  his 
senses.  To  be  sure  there  is  nothing  very  exhilar- 
ating to  the  Divine  mind  in  this  degree  of  homage, 
provided  it  is  anyway  sincere,  which  is  extremely 
problematical  at  least :  but  just  as  surely  there  can 
be  nothing  revolting  in  it,  nor  even  displeasing,  to 
that  mind:  so  that  if  the  creator  had  but  destined 
His  creature  to  remain  an  innocent  animal  merely, 
without  any  capacity  of  spiritual  life  or  enjoyment, 
He  would,  I  dare  say,  have  been  highly  satisfied 
with  it. 

Selfishness  to  be  sure  is  a  much  more  potent, 
stubborn,  and  profound  evil  than  worldliness,  and 
far  more  hostile  practically  to  human  society  or 
fellowship ;  and  Swedenborg  in  order  to  show  the 
superior  malignity  of  the  former  love  to  the  latter 
as  an  element  of  human  life,  characterizes  the  hells 
which  grow  out  of  it  as  diabolic,  whereas  he  always 
gives  the  hells  of  worldliness  the  milder  designation 
of  Satanic.      But  selfishness,  although  a  less  super- 


BECAUSE  HE  UTILIZES  IT  IN  THE  HELLS.  199 

ficial  evil  than  worldliness,  accommodates  itself  in 
some  sort  equally  well  to  the  Divine  administration 
in  human  affairs  :  as  is  shoAvn  by  vrhat  Sweden- 
borg  says  of  the  hells  to  which  it  is  ministerial. 
The  devil  and  Satan  v/ould  be  very  discreditable 
products  of  the  creative  love,  provided  they  owed 
their  original  existence  to  it.  But  they  do  not  in 
the  slightest  degree.  Satan  and  the  devil  (by 
which  terms  respectively  of  com\se  one  would  be 
understood  to  mean  not  any  individual  existences 
but  the  whole  mass  of  human  kind  in  whom  either 
the  love  of  the  world  or  the  love  of  self  character- 
istically predominates)  owe  their  origin  to  a  vital 
misconception  they  are  both  alike  under  in  regard 
to  human  freedom,  deeming  it  absolute  instead  of 
moral,  contingent,  relative.  This  misconception  on 
their  part  is  very  unfortunate  no  doubt,  because,  as 
it  leads  to  all  manner  of  practical  injustice  and  un- 
truth, it  requires  them  to  be  separated  from  the 
orderly  mass  of  their  brethren,  and  shut  up  for  a 
long  while  in  work-houses  where  they  are  com- 
pelled under  pain  of  forfeiting  their  daily  bread, 
and  of  even  worse  punishments,  to  work,  and  re- 
frain from  bad  manners.  But  they  are  never  in  the 
sliglitest  degree  objects  of  God's  contempt,  let  alone 
abhorrence,  but  equally  with  heavenly  existences  at- 
tract His  unswerving  mercy  or  compassion. 


200         THE  ONLY  INTOLERABLE  EVIL  TO   GOD  IS 

And  thus  you  are  prepared  for  what  I  have  next 
got  to  say.  It  is  a  very  intelHgible  proposition  in 
itself,  but  it  may  perhaps  encounter  some  prejudice 
in  your  understanding.  The  proposition  is  this : 
that  while  we  owe  our  milder  or  moral  evils,  those, 
namely,  which  separate  us  outwardly  from  our  fel- 
low-man, to  the  inspiration  of  the  world-spirit,  the 
spirit  which  reigns  in  every  man  by  virtue  of  his 
natural  birth,  the  inspiring  cause  of  our  deeper 
spiritual  evils,  those  which  separate  us  inwardly 
from  God,  our  life-source,  and  call  for  our  natural 
redemption  at  His  hands,  is  exclusively  the  church- 
spirit  in  humanity,  the  spirit  that  leads  every  man 
that  has  it  to  think  himself  nearer  to  God  than 
other  men. 

This  proposition,  I  repeat,  may  meet  with  a  slow 
reception  at  your  hands.  Let  me  then  above  all 
things  make  sure  that  you  perfectly  understand 
what  I  mean  by  it. 

What  I  call  the  deeper  spiritual  evils  which 
attach  to  men,  separating  them  from  their  crea- 
tive source,  are  those  of  confirmed  selfhood  or  self- 
righteousness.  Do  I  mean  you  to  understand  me, 
then,  as  saying  that  the  church-spirit  in  humanity  is 
the  source  of  all  our  spiritual  unrighteousness  ?  This 
is  literally  what  I  mean  to  say,  and  what  I  would  be 
understood  as  saying  :    that  the  church-spirit  is  par 


PROPRIUM,   SELFHOOD,   OR  SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS.      201 

excellence  the  evil-spirit  in  humanity,  source  of  all 
its  profounder  and  irremediable  woes.  Don't,  I  beg 
of  you,  interpret  me  to  your  own  thought  as  saying 
that  the  church  stimulates  any  of  man's  actual  or 
moral  evils.  I  say  no  such  stupid  thing.  For  it  is 
notorious  that  the  church  studiously  fosters  the  sen- 
timent of  moral  worth  or  dignity  in  its  disciples, 
the  sentiment  of  distinction  or  difference  between 
them  and  other  men.  It  is  only  by  so  doing  in- 
deed that  she  fixes  or  hardens  them  in  that  ten- 
dency to  propriiim  or  selfhood  to  which  they  are 
naturally  inclined,  and  thus  delivers  them  over  bound 
hand  and  foot  to  spiritual  pride,  pride  of  character, 
in  short  a  5^^-righteous  spirit,  which  is  the  only 
form  of  evil,  the  only  form  of  sin  or  blasphemy, 
fundamentally  at  variance  with  man's  spiritual  ex- 
istence. But  this  latter  evil  is  undeniably  a  church 
development  in  our  nature.  The  church  is  the  ac- 
tual parent  or  protagonist  of  all  the  spiritual  evil 
latent  or  possible  in  human  nature  —  evil  of  self- 
hood or  self-righteousness ;  and  by  focusing  it  in 
her  own  haughty  personality  gives  God  at  length  his 
opportunity  —  in  allowing  the  church  to  become  the 
mere  mendicant  and  impotent  existence  it  now  is  in 
the  earth  —  to  crush  out  in  every  spiritual  high- 
place,  or  most  recondite  corner  of  human  nature 
itself,  the  otherwise  inaccessible  and  flagitious  evil 


202         FOR  THIS  IS  SPIRITUAL  OR  LIVING  EVIL; 

which  it  represents.  God  has  no  power  to  combat 
spiritual  evil,  save  as  it  ultimates  itself  in  natural 
or  outward  form.  And  the  church  pretension  in 
humanity  is  the  ultimate  natural  or  outward  form 
of  all  man's  spiritual  profligacy.  For  human  nature 
has  no  existence  in  se,  and  comes  to  light  only 
through  men's  consciousness :  not  their  individual  or 
private  consciousness,  but  their  associated  or  public 
one  :  and  the  church  and  the  world  are  as  yet  the 
only  recognized  forms  of  this  latter  consciousness. 

I  mean  then  that  the  church-spirit  in  humanity 
is  the  expression  of  all  man's  patent  or  latent  spir- 
itual evil,  and  reduces  his  mere  moral  evil  to  com- 
parative insignificance,  for  the  latter  is  curable,  and 
the  former  not.  However  selfish  or  worldly  a  man 
may  be,  these  are  good  honest  natural  evils,  and 
you  have  only  to  apply  a  motive  sufficiently  stimu- 
lating in  either  case  and  you  will  induce  the  sub- 
ject to  forbear  them.  But  spiritual  evil  is  inward 
evil  exclusively,  pertaining  to  the  selfhood  of  the 
man,  or  livingly  appropriated  by  him  as  his  own, 
and  cannot  therefore  become  known  to  him  save  in 
the  form  of  an  outward  natural  representation ;  for  it 
is  not  like  moral  evil  mere  oppugnancy  to  good, 
but  it  is  the  actual  and  deadly  profanation  of  good, 
or  the  lavish  acknowledgment  of  it  with  a  view  of 
subordinating  it  to  personal,  or  selfish  and  worldly. 


AND  FATAL,  IF  ALLOWED,  TO  THE  HUMAN  RACE.     203 

ends.  It  is  the  only  truly  formidable  evil  known 
to  God's  providence,  being  that  of  se^-righteousness, 
and  hence  the  only  evil  which  essentially  threatens 
to  undermine  the  foundations  of  God's  throne.  It 
is  that  evil  of  unconscious  hypocrisy  or  making 
believe  which  alone  Christ  is  represented  in  the 
New  Testament  as  having  spiritually  stigmatized  to 
men's  eternal  abhorrence,  and  which  Swedenborg 
says  he  w^as  able  to  overcome  only  by  subjugating 
the  influence  of  all  the  heavens  and  all  the  hells  to 
his  own  spotless  love  of  mankind,  so  utterly  elim- 
inating from  our  nature  or  history  in  its  Godward 
relations  the  vicious  and  thoroughly  damnable  ele- 
ment of  privacy  or  proprium  —  that  is,  of  private  or 
personal  pretension  among  men,  of  individual  char- 
acter, or  finite  independent  selfhood. 

This  all  seems  plain  enough,  but  now  you  will 
ask  me  :  How  the  church  comes  to  be  representa- 
tively identified  with  this  capital  evil  of  selfhood 
or  self-righteousness  in  man. 

I  will  answer  your  question  in  as  few  words  as 
possible,  though  I  am  not  without  a  fear  that  they 
will  not  be  so  few  as  I  could  wish.  But  I  will  at 
all  events  do  my  best,  in  the  limited  space  that  the 
plan  of  these  letters  allows  me,  to  make  the  point 
clear.  God  knows  that  I  have  not  the  least  idea 
of   making    my   answer    acceptable   to    you,    except 


204  THE  CHURCH  ALONE   PRODUCES 

through  your  own  goodness  of  heart,  or  love  of 
mankind.  What  I  want  to  do  then  is  to  convince 
you  that  the  church  is  alone  chargeable  with  the 
production  of  actual  projprium,  character,  differential 
selfhood,  among  men ;  and  that  in  so  doing  it  has 
representatively  brought  to  a  head  the  fundamental 
evil  of  the  created  nature,  that  which  spiritually 
vivifies  all  its  other  evils  moral  and  physical :  so 
that  absolutely  nothing  remains  between  us  and  the 
full  fruition  of  God's  spiritual  kingdom  on  earth, 
but  the  hearty  recognition  of  the  visible  church  as 
once  a  living  but  now  an  entirely  fossil  representa- 
tive element  of  human  nature. 

To  begin  then :  Suppose  for  a  moment  that  self- 
ishness and  worldliness  were  our  only  vices.  Sup- 
pose that  man  and  the  world  alone  existed  to  men's 
senses  and  intelligence,  just  as  they  do  to  the  senses 
and  intelligence  of  the  animals ;  and  that  the  influ- 
ence of  these  things  was  entirely  uncomplicated  by 
any  influence  derived  from  the  church  as  an  insti- 
tution. It  is  easy  enough  to  see  that  selfishness 
and  worldliness  in  this  hypothetical  state  of  things 
would  be  no  vices  at  all,  but  simple  instincts  of 
men's  natural  life  leading  them  to  the  fullest  pos- 
sible enjoyment  of  the  goods  about  them,  and  be- 
getting in  them  meanAvhile  of  course  the  utmost 
possible   indifference   to   God   and   their    neighbor : 


THIS  DESPERATE  EVIL  IN  MEN.  205 

hut  there  stopping.  For  these  things  are  vices  only 
as  they  tend  to  selfhood,  or  lead  us  into  practical 
conflict  with  our  spiritual  destiny ;  only  as  they  tend 
to  interest  us  supremely  in  a  lower  order  of  life 
than  that  which  our  nature  fits  us  to  enjoy :  and 
palpably  in  the  case  supposed  these  spiritual  limita- 
tions would  be  wholly  lacking.  It  is  to  the  church 
primarily  that  the  world  is  indebted  for  its  every 
gleam  of  spiritual  knowledge ;  and  without  the 
church  therefore  the  world  would  never  have  learned 
to  condemn  either  selfishness  or  worldliness.  A  man 
here  and  there  by  obeying  a  greedy  or  covetous 
spirit  might  paralyze  the  life  of  his  senses,  or  bring 
practical  ruin  upon  his  organization ;  but  however 
unfortunate  his  particular  excesses  might  prove  him, 
he  never  by  any  possibility  could  deem  them  either 
sinfd,  as  reflecting  a  certain  inward  or  spiritual  tur- 
pitude on  himself,  or  even  evil,  as  reflecting  a  cer- 
tain outward  or  moral  opprobrium  upon  his  conduct. 
So  far  indeed  from  anything  of  this  sort  being  pos- 
sible to  the  man,  we  have  only  got  to  invest  him 
with  a  capacity  of  reflection  in  order  to  see  that 
he  would  necessarily  under  the  circumstances  deem 
his  selfishness  and  worldliness,  or  his  lust  and  cov- 
etousness,  his  highest  law  or  duty. 

But  in  point  of  fact  a  man  of  that  simple  spirit- 
less make  could  have  no  capacity  of  reflection,  and 


206        CONSCIENCE  THE  EVIDENCE  OF  AN  INFINITE 

consequently  no  conscience  of  law  or  duty.  Con- 
science presupposes  in  all  its  subjects  a  personal 
development,  or  sense  of  selfhood,  as  its  necessary 
ground ;  and  personality  in  every  case  is  a  result- 
ant of  two  forces,  a  conventionally  good  and  evil 
one,  belonging  to  the  unconscious  nature  of  the 
subject,  and  yet  so  exquisitely  adjusted  to  each 
other,  or  so  evenly  balanced,  as  to  make  him  feel 
without  the  least  misgiving  that  he  is  absolutely  a 
free  and  rational  individuality,  the  essential  arbiter 
of  his  own  actions.  In  short  the  existence  of  con- 
science in  men  presupposes  the  existence  of  the 
church  and  the  world  as  extreme  representative  fac- 
tors of  human  nature,  while  the  perfect  equilibrium 
or  mutual  adjustment  of  these  factors  in  their  prac- 
tical operation  upon  the  subject  argues  a  really  Di- 
vine or  infinite  purpose  and  providence  in  humanity. 
You  see  then  that  it  would  be  the  height  of  ab- 
surdity to  attribute  to  a  man  whose  very  nature  is 
representatively  expressed  by  the  church  and  the 
world  anything  short  of  a  highly  composite  genesis. 
It  is  thus  exclusively  the  alliance  of  the  church 
and  the  world  in  our  nature  that  stamps  it  human, 
and  so  gives  men  their  original  consciousness  of 
evil  being,  in  being  either  selfish  or  worldly.  And 
it  is  specifically  the  influence  of  the  church  in 
our   nature   that   brings    about   this    result.      It   is 


AND  A  FINITE  STRUGGLE  IN  OUR  NATURE.       207 

a  grand  providential  work  for  the  church  to  do,  for 
it  would  never  have  got  into  the  mind  of  man  that 
to  Hve  for  self  and  the  world  was  not  the  highest 
ideal  of  human  life,  the  supreme  law  of  human 
destiny,  unless  the  church  had  put  it  there.  And 
since  human  history  is  only  a  conflict  between  the 
claims  of  our  private  selfhood  and  the  claims  of 
our  Divine-natural  manhood  upon  our  allegiance, 
we  may  say  that  the  church  in  stigmatizing  selfish- 
ness and  worldliness  to  men's  opinion,  laid  the 
foundation  stone  of  human  history. 

But  now  do  you  not  see  at  a  glance  that  the 
practical  efi'ect  of  the  church's  initiative  in  this 
matter  could  only  be  to  originate  a  broad  division 
of  men  into  two  classes :  one  good,  as  painfully  ab- 
staining from  selfish  and  worldly  lusts,  the  other 
evily  as  freely  indulging  them?  The  church,  so  far 
forth  as  it  is  a  visible  institution  in  the  earth,  and 
claims  a  Divine  warrant  corporately  to  exist  and 
function,  looks  upon  all  men  without  exception  as 
naturally  bound  to  the  pursuit  of  happiness.  For 
bare  existence  is  a  happiness  to  man,  stimulating 
as  it  does  every  variety  of  passional  desire  and  ac- 
tivity in  his  bosom,  and  by  a  necessary  instinct  he 
seeks  to  promote,  enlarge,  and  intensify  this  happi- 
ness. Now  the  church  authoritatively  bids  the  man 
pause   in   this    enticing   career,  saying  to  him  that 


208  THE  CHURCH  A  MERE  RUDIMENTARY 

happiness  is  not  the  supreme  law  of  his  activity,  at 
all  events  is  not  its  first  law  ;  that  he  is  first  of 
all  a  creature  of  God,  gifted  with  freedom  and  in- 
teUigence,  and  bound  therefore  to  acquaint  himself 
with  his  creator's  will,  in  order  to  see  that  his  pri- 
vate pursuit  of  happiness  involve  him  in  no  prac- 
tical contrariety  with  that  will.  The  man  either 
listens,  or  does  not  listen.  If  he  listens,  he  forth- 
with enrolls  himself  in  the  church  ranks,  and  sepa- 
rates himself  from  a  world  conventionally  supposed 
to  be  lying  in  wickedness.  If  he  does  not  listen  to 
the  church's  testimony,  but  rejects  it  as  against  him- 
self, he  identifies  himself  with  the  profane  world,  and 
cuts  himself  (M  from  the  church's  blessing. 

Hence,  as  I  say,  the  inevitable  division  of  man- 
kind into  two  classes,  a  good  and  an  evil  class,  or 
a  sacred  and  a  profane  class,  the  one  professing  to 
observe  the  Divine  will,  or  what  is  reputed  to  be 
such  in  all  things,  the  other  following  its  own  will 
supremely,  without  making  any  profession  one  way 
or  the  other.  Now  however  necessary  and  provi- 
dential a  work  this  may  have  been  on  the  part  of 
the  church  to  effect,  let  me  remark  first  of  all  that 
it  was  an  exceedingly  rude  work  at  the  very  least; 
a  very  unskilful  carrying  out  of  the  Divine  design. 
Undoubtedly  the  Divine  design  in  giving  the  church 
a  visible  institution  was  to  establish  a  witness  of 


EXPONENT  OF  CONSCIENCE.  209 

Himself  in  the  earth  of  men's  carnal  memory,  which 
might  always  serve  to  base  and  authenticate  their 
interior  or  spiritual  apprehensions  of  Him  as  a  power 
actively  latent  in  human  nature  and  human  affairs. 
But  it  was,  to  say  the  very  least,  an  exceedingly 
rude  and  crude  memorial  of  the  Divine  name,  to 
identify  it  not  with  the  spiritual  revelation  exclu- 
sively of  that  name  or  quality,  but  with  the  literal 
and  objective  discrimination  of  certain  perfectly  petty 
and  squalid  persons  into  a  celestial  and  infernal 
class,  the  one  full  of  righteous  or  just  hope  in  God's 
favor,  the  other  consigned  to  righteous  despair. 

I  say  "  at  the  very  least."  But  the  work  which 
this  early  church  thus  did  in  the  earth  was  very 
much  worse  than  coarse  and  unskilful.  It  spiritually 
falsified  the  sacred  name  it  was  intended  to  keep 
the  world  in  remembrance  of;  and  it  has  assidu- 
ously perpetuated  the  falsification — through  its  long 
and  dreary  seqv,ela  of  lineally  descended  churches  — 
even  down  to  the  present  day.  For  the  distinction 
of  men  into  good  and  evil,  however  fundamental  a 
datum  it  be  to  our  natural  intelligence,  does  not 
really  or  spiritually  exist  to  the  Divine  mind  save 
in  accommodation  to  the  needs  of  that  most  nascent 
and  infirm  intelligence.  That  is  to  say :  it  is  no 
absolute  distinction,  as  the  church  holds,  character- 
izing men  spiritually  or  as  they  exist  in  themselves, 


21(>  CHANGE  OF  PLAN. 


but  only  as  they  stand  differentially  related  by  their 
phenomenal  action  to  a  great  objective  work  of  right- 
eousness to  be  accomplished  by  God  in  the  fulness 
of  time  in  human  natui-e  itself:  by  which  all  men, 
notwithstanding  their  relative  or  subjective  differ- 
ences in  regard  to  it,  will  be  brought  into  complete 
formal  or  objective  harmony  with  the  Divine  will. 

—  But  as  I  dimly  foresaw,  my  friend,  I  shall  be 
obliged  to  interrupt  my  writing  here  that  I  may 
try  to  impress  you  anew  with  the  extreme  intel- 
lectual importance  of  rightly  conceiving  the  work  I 
am  endeavoring  to  elucidate  in  this  place :  a  icork 
of  spiritual  creation,  purportintj  to  be  wrought  hy  God 
within  the  precincts,  by  no  means  of  men's  phenom- 
enal personality,  but  of  their  common  substance  or 
nature.  This  is  our  one  theme,  and  we  must  per- 
petually bear  it  in  mind  under  all  our  discussion 
of  incidental  topics.  I  have  undoubtedly  been  re- 
miss in  not  sufficiently  enforcing  this  necessity  upon 
you.  And  I  am  persuaded  that  I  cannot  do  better 
now,  awkward  and  tardy  proceeding  though  it  be, 
than  to  interpose  an  intercalary  letter  or  two  just 
here,  defining  what  I  mean  by  spiritual  creation 
much  more  fully  than  I  have  hitherto  done :  leaving 
the  interrupted  thread  of  my  discourse  in  regard  to 
church  historv  to  be  resumed  afterwards. 


w. 


■  »    ■"    I"    «■■»    "    "»    «"    '■     'f    ""    '»     "  "y^ 


LETTER     XVII. 


"#Y  DEAR  FRIEND:  — A  spiritual  or  liv- 
ing creation,  which  consists  in  giving  its 
creature  life  or  being,  must  of  necessity 
on  the  part  of  the  creator  confess  itself  a 
purely  subjective  or  miraculous  one,  attesting  at  most 
His  indwelling  infinitude  in  the  created  nature. 
"  Erom  the  uncreate,  infinite  Being  itself  and  Life 
itself,"  says  Swedenborg,  "no  being  can  be  imme- 
diately created,  because  the  Divine  is  one  and  indi- 
visible. But  from  created  and  finite  substances,  so 
formed  that  the  Divine  may  he  in  them,  beings  may 
be  created.  Since  men  and  angels  are  such  beings, 
they  are  only  recipients  of  life ;  wherefore  if  any 
suffers  himself  to  be  so  far  misled  as  to  think  that  he 
is  not  a  recipient  of  life  but  life  itself,  nothing  can 
hinder  him  thinking  himself  a  God."  *  Again  :  "  Di- 
vine Love  cannot  create  any  one  immediately  from 
itself,  for  in  that  case  the  creature  would  be  love  in 


*  Dioine  Love  and  IFisdom,  4. 


212  LAWS  OF  THE 


its  essence,  or  the  Lord  himself;  but  it  can  create 
beings  from  substances  so  formed  as  to  be  capable 
of  receiving  its  love  and  wisdom.  Comparatively  as 
the  mundane  sun  is  unable  by  all  its  heat  and  light 
to  make  the  earth  germinate,  when  nevertheless  it 
can  produce  germination  from  earthy  substances," 
such  as  seeds,  "  in  which  it  may  be  present  by  its 
heat  and  light,  causing  vegetation."  *  So  he  says 
elsewhere,  to  the  same  effect :  "  Life  viewed  in  itself, 
which  is  God,  cannot  create  another  being  that  shall 
be  life  itself:  for  the  life  which  is  God  is  uncreate, 
continuous,  and  indivisible;  hence  it  is  that  God  is 
one.  But  the  life  which  is  God  can  create,  out  of 
substances  which  are  not  life,  forms  in  lohich  it  can 
exist,  giving  these  forms  to  seem  as  if  they  themselves 
lived.  Now  men  are  such  forms,  which  as  being 
only  receptacles  of  life,  could  not  in  the  first  creation, 
or  originally,  be  anything  but  images  and  likenesses 
of  God :  for  life  and  its  recipients  adapt  themselves 
each  to  the  other  like  active  and  passive,  but  in  no 
wise  mix  together.  Hence  human  forms,  being  but 
recipient  forms  of  life,  do  not  live  from  themselves  but 
from  God  who  alone  is  life."  f  "  It  seems  to  man 
as  if  he  lived  from  himself,  but  this  is  a  fallacy.  The 
reason  why  it  seems  as  if  life  were  in  man  is,  that  it 
enters  by  influx  from  the  Lord  into  his  inmost  forms, 

*  Divine  Love  and  Wisdom,  5.  f  Alh.  Creed,  25. 


SPIRITUAL  CREATION.  213 

wMch  are  remote  from  the  sight  of  his  thought,  and  so 
are  unperceived.  Further,  the  principal  cause  wliich 
is  life,  and  the  instrumental  cause  which  is  recipient 
of  it,  act  together  as  one  cause  and  this  action  is  felt 
in  the  latter,  or  in  Man,  as  if  it  were  in  himself. 
Still  another  reason  why  life  appears  to  be  in  man 
himself,  is  that  the  Divine  love  is  of  such  an  infinite 
quality  that  it  desires  to  communicate  to  man  "  (or 
have  in  common  with  him)  "  what  belongs  to  itself."  * 
As  is  said  in  another  place :  "  It  is  the  essence  of 
love  not  to  love  itself  but  others,  and  to  be  joined 
in  unity  with  them  by  love.  It  is  also  essential  to 
it  to  be  beloved  by  those  others,  since  thereby  conjunc- 
tion is  effected.  The  essence  of  all  love  consists  in 
conjunction :  yea  the  life  of  it,  what  we  call  its  en- 
joyment, pleasantness,  delight,  sweetness,  beatitude, 
happiness,  felicity.  Love  consists  in  willing  what  is 
our  own  to  be  another's,  and  feeling  that  others  pri- 
vate delight  as  our  own.  This  it  is  to  love.  But  for  a 
man  to  feel  his  own  delight  in  another,  and  not  the 
other's  delight  in  himself,  —  this  is  not  to  love ;  for 
in  this  case  he  loves  himself,  but  in  the  other  his 
neighbor.  These  two  loves,  self-love  and  neighborly 
love,  are  diametrical  opposites ;  for  in  proportion  as 
any  one  loves  another  from  self-love,  he  afterwards 
hates  him.     Hence  it  is  evident  that  the  Divine  love 

*  Ath.  Creed,  20. 


214  SPIRITUAL  CREATION   INERT  WITHOUT 

cannot  help  being  and  existing  in  other  beings  and 
existences  whom  it  loves  and  by  whom  it  is  beloved. 
For  when  such  a  quality  exists  in  all  love,  it  is  bound 
to  exist  in  the  amplest  measure,  that  is,  infinitely  or 
without  drawback,  in  Love  itself."  *  And  Sweden- 
borg  goes  on  to  say,  that  if  infinite  love  existed  in 
others,  by  creation,  they  would  be  Love  itself,  and 
God  consequently  would  be  self-love,  whereof  not 
the  least  conceivable  fibre  is  possible  to  Him,  being 
totally  opposed  to  His  being.  "  This  reciprocation  of 
love  must  take  place  between  God  and  other  beings 
in  whose  selfhood  there  is  nothing  of  the  Divine." 
This  objective  middle-ground  however,  which  all 
spiritual  creation  implies  between  creature  and  crea- 
tor, and  makes  common  to  them  both,  is  objective 
only  to  the  creature's  imperfect  intelligence,  while  it 
is  in  truth  a  necessary  element  of  his  subjectivity, 
being  requisite  to  define  the  spiritual  creation  to  his 
limited  perception,  or  give  it  anchorage  and  embodi- 
ment to  his  experience.  It  no  way  enters  as  such 
objective  middle-ground  into  the  creative  idea,  but 
confesses  itself  a  mere  latent,  still  unrecognized,  con- 
stitutional factor  or  law  of  the  created  subjectivity. 
Thus  in  the  actual  creation  nature  is  the  objective 
middle-ground   between   creature   and   creator ;    the 

*  Divine  Love  and  Wisdom^  47,  48,  49. 


THE  CREATURE'S  NATURAL  CONSTITUTION.  215 

mother-substance  which  to  the  created  intelHgence 
gives  creation  sensible  background,  or  is  necessary  to 
constitute  it,  and  make  it  visible.  But  this  natm^al 
mother-substance  has  no  independent  existence  to  the 
creative  intelligence  ;  but  exists  only  as  an  implication 
or  involution  of  the  created  or  finite  selfhood,  to  which 
fallacious  quantity  it  affords  all  the  while  the  only  real 
or  universal  and  quam-sT^iniiitd  pretext  and  justifica- 
tion, and  hence  in  every  way  invites  and  secures  to  it 
self  the  tenderest  Divine  concession  or  accommodation. 
Nature  indeed  offers  to  the  universal  heart  of  man 
the  nearest  possible  symbol  —  that  is,  pledge  or  reali- 
zation —  of  the  Divine  infinitude  it  is  any  way  capa- 
ble of  acknowledging ;  and  it  is  freely  worn  therefore 
by  God  as  a  temporary  mask  or  visor,  under  cover 
of  which  He  pursues,  and  finally  legitimates  to  the 
created  intelligence.  His  stupendous  spiritual  ends. 

It  is  plain  to  see,  then,  that  creation,  in  the  only 
sense  in  which  it  is  capable  of  being  rationally 
apprehended,  that  is,  as  a  purely  spiritual  or  living 
work,  is  bound  by  virtue  of  the  creator's  infinitude  to 
determine  itself  to  objective  natural  form ;  or,  to  use  a 
compact  and  convenient  expression  of  Swedenborg,  is 
bound  to  ultimate  itself  naturally  or  objectively  to  the 
creature's  experience,  in  order  to  reflect  or  reproduce 
to  his  finite  consciousness  the  infinite  life  or  being  he 
has  in  God.     "  By  creation  is  meant,"  says  Sweden- 


216  SPIRITUAL  CREATION  INERT  WITHOUT 

borg,  "  what  is  Divine  from  inmost  to  outermost,  or 
first  to  last.  Everything  which  proceeds  from  the 
Divine  begins  from  Himself,  and  progresses  accord- 
ing to  order  even  to  the  ultimate  end  :  thus  through 
the  heavens  into  the  world,  and  there  rests  as  in  its 
ultimate  "  or  home;  "  for  the  ultimate  of  Divine  order 
is  in  the  nature  of  the  world.  What  is  of  such 
a  quality  is  properly  said  to  be  created."  *  So,  in 
another  place,  he  says  :  "  Scientific  things  "  —  by 
which  he  means,  well-established  facts  as  disengaged 
from  the  personal  or  superstitious  fancies  of  men  — 
"  which  belong  to  the  sphere  of  man's  natural  intel- 
ligence, are  the  ultimates  of  order  there ;  and  things 
prior,  that  is,  spiritual  things,  must  be  in  ultimates 
that  they  may  exist  and  appear  in  the  natural  sphere. 
All  prior  or  spiritual  things,  moreover,  tend  to  ulti- 
mates as  to  their  own  boundaries  or  limits,  and  exist 
in  those  boundaries  or  limits  as  causes  in  their  effects, 
or  as  superior  things  exist  in  inferior,  as  in  their 
proper  vehicles  or  vessels.  Hence  it  is  that  the 
spiritual  world  terminates  in  man's  natural  mind,  in 
which  mind  accordingly  the  things  of  the  spiritual 
world  are  exhibited  representatively"  as  in  a  glass, 
or  picture.  "  Unless  spiritual  things  "  —  which,  re- 
member, are  always  living  affections  of  goodness  and 

*  Arcana  Calestia,  10634.     See  also  Ath.  Creed,  29. 


THE  CREATURE'S  NATURAL  CONSTITUTION.         217 

truth  —  "  were  representatively  reproduced  by  such 
things  as  are  in  the  world,  they  would  not  be  at  all 
rationally  apprehended."  * 

"  Divine  order  never  stops  in  a  middle-point  (as  the 
angel  or  heaven)  and  there  forms  a  thing  without  its 
ultimate,  for  then  it  would  not  be  in  a  full  and 
perfect  state ;  but  goes  straight  on  to  its  ultimate, 
and  when  it  is  in  its  ultimate,  it  then  forms,  and  also 
by  mediums  there  brought  together,  it  redintegrates 
itself  and  produces  ulterior  things  by  procreations : 
whence  the  ultimate  is  called  the  seminary  or  seed- 
place  of  heaven."  f  "  The  ultimate  of  Divine  order 
is  in  man,  and  because  he  is  the  ultimate  of  Divine 
order,  he  is  also  its  basis  and  foundation.  Heaven 
without  the  human  race  would  be  like  a  house  want- 
ing its  foundation." I  "The  end  of  creation,  which 
is  that  all  things  may  return  to  the  creator,  and  that 
conjunction  may  be  effected,  exists  in  its  ultimates."  ^ 
"  That  all  ultimate  ends  become  anew  first  ends,  is 
evident  from  the  fact  that  there  is  nothing  so  inert 
and  dead  but  has  some  efficiency  in  it;  even  sand 
exhales  somewhat  which  contributes  assistance  in 
producing  and  therefore  in  effecting  something."  || 
"  The  ultimate,  lohen  order  is  perfect,  is  holy  above 

*  Arc.  Ceel.  5373.  §  I)ivi?ie  Love  and  Wisdom,  171. 

t  Heaven  and  Hell,  315.  ||  Ibid,  172. 

+  Ibid.,  304. 


218  IMPLICATION   OF  NATURE  IN  CREATION 

interior  things,  for  the  hohness  of  interior  things  is 
there  complete."  * 

It  is  this  implication  of  the  created  nature,  accord- 
ingly, in  the  spiritual  creation,  which  alone  gives 
that  creation  its  truly  miraculous  quality,  and  saves 
it  from  being  what  otherwise  it  must  always  have 
appeared  to  be,  a  mere  magical  product,  or  work  of 
enchantment.  Magic  is  the  power  of  gratuitous  or 
ostentatious  productivity ;  the  power  to  produce  some- 
thing out  of  nothing,  consequently  without  labor- 
pains  :  thus  a  something  which  has  no  inward  ground 
of  being,  and  therefore  exists  surreptitiously  or  by 
virtue  of  a  deception  practised  upon  the  senses  of 
those  who  acknowledge  it.  It  is  a  power  which  used 
to  flourish,  in  very  high  places  too,  upon  the  earth ; 
but  is  happily  now  confined  to  the  hells,  save  in  so 
far  as  the  hells  themselves  are  vainly  trying  to  com- 
pass an  unsuspected  lodgment  in  the  human  mind  in 
the  guise  of  an  absurd  doctrine  called  Spiritualism. 
But  the  power  of  all  the  hells  put  together  would  be 
impotent  at  this  day  to  persuade  any  man  of  average 
spiritual  intelligence  that  magic,  however  specious 
its  performances,  is  anything  but  a  gross  mockery  of 
.creative  power,  or  ever  succeeds  in  demonstrating 
anything  but  its  own  unlikeness  to  it.  It  is  the 
characteristic  of  power  truly  creative  to  be  able  to 

*  Arcana  Calestia,  9S24.     See  also  5077,  9360,  9212,  9216. 


GIVES  IT  ALL  ITS   INTEREST  TO  THE  HEART.       219 

endow  its  creature  with  a  miraculous  mother-sub- 
stance, or  natural  basis,  and  by  that  means  reproduce 
as  in  a  glass  all  its  own  spiritual  effects,  so  verifying 
or  authenticating  them  to  the  creature's  understanding. 
And  it  is  the  unfailing  attribute  of  natural  existence 
to  be  a  form  of  use  to  something  higher  than  itself, 
thus  the  mineral  to  the  vegetable,  the  vegetable  to 
the  animal,  and  the  animal  to  man ;  so  that  whatso- 
ever has  not  either  potentially  or  actually  this  soul 
of  use  within  it,  does  not  honestly  belong  to  nature, 
but  confesses  itself  a  mere  sensational  effect  produced 
upon  the  individual  intelligence.* 

*  "  Hence,"  says  Swedenborg,  "  you  may  discern  how  sensually  — 
that  is,  from  the  inspiration  of  the  bodily  senses,  and  the  darkness 
■which  they  cast  over  spiritual  things  —  they  think  who  deem  that  na- 
ture is  self-originated.  These  men  think  from  the  eye  and  not  from 
the  understanding.  People  of  this  sort  are  able  to  think  nothing  of  what 
being  and  existing  is  in  itself,  namely :  that  it  is  eternal,  uncreate,  and 
infinite.  Nor  are  they  able  to  think  of  Life  in  itself,  but  as  of  some 
volatile  thing,  passing  off  into  nothing;  nor  yet  of  Love  and  Wisdom, 
being  totally  incapable  of  discerning  that  all  things  of  nature  derive 
thence  their  existence.  And  indeed  it  cannot  be  seen  by  any  one  that 
all  things  of  nature  exist  thence,  unless  nature  herself  be  thought  of  as 
an  orderly  series  of  uses,  and  not  estimated  from  some  of  her  outward 
forms  merely,  which  are  only  visual  objects.  For  the  uses  of  nature 
proceed  only  from  life,  and  their  series  and  order  from  wisdom  and  love. 
But  her  visible  forms  are  mere  continents  of  these  uses,  so  that  if  they 
alone  or  primarily  be  regarded,  nothing  of  life  can  be  seen  in  nature, 
much  less  anything  of  love  and  wisdom,  and  consequently  nothing  of 
God."  —  Bioine  Love  and  Wisdom,  46. 


220  SPIRITUAL  CREATION  INTERPRETED 

Creative  power  in  truth  has  at  this  day  no  fitter 
expression  than  that  which  is  furnished  it  by  the 
modern  doctrine  of  Evohition  :  understood,  to  be  sure, 
somewhat  more  largely  than  that  doctrine  is  by  its 
current  scientific  adherents.  For  to  men  of  science 
generally  the  doctrine  of  evolution  imports  merely 
the  development  of  one  natural  species  or  kind  out 
of  other  pre-existing  species  or  kinds ;  whereas  a  true 
or  philosophic  doctrine  of  evolution  implies  the  con- 
version of  natural  (or  lower)  substance  into  spiritual 
(or  higher)  form.  There  is  no  doubt  that  man,  in 
so  far  as  his  very  inferior  animality  is  concerned,  is  a 
strict  product  of  the  animal  kingdom:  but  there  is 
therefore  no  reason  to  hold  him  to  be  an  evolution 
of  it,  unless  indeed  evolution  means  devolution,  or  a 
process  from  more  to  less,  from  strength  to  weakness. 
He  is,  doubtless,  so  far  forth  as  his  animal  natm'e  is 
concerned,  identical  with  all  other  animals,  only  less 
highly  gifted  than  they  with  aggressive  and  persistent 
force ;  and  so  far  accordingly  there  is  more  ground 
to  pronounce  him  an  involution  of  the  animal  king- 
dom than  an  evolution  of  it.  But  man  is  not  essen- 
tially animal.  He  is  animal  at  most  on  his  organic 
side,  and  it  is  only  by  remorselessly  slumping  his 
distinctively  inorganic  or  human  attributes  in  his 
animal  or  organic  ones,  that  any  pretext  is  found  for 
making   his   existence  a   product  of  evolution   from 


BY  THE  DOCTEINE  OF  EVOLUTION.       221 

lower  forms.  In  so  far  as  he  is  animal,  he  does  not 
require  any  doctrine  of  evolution  to  explain  his  ad- 
vent unless  it  be  one  which  explains  at  the  same 
time  the  advent  of  the  whole  animal  kingdom  of 
Avhich  he  forms  a  part.  And  so  far  as  he  is  distinc- 
tively human  and  inorganic  —  that  is,  unembraced  in 
the  animal  kingdom  —  his  own  particular  animality 
stands  between  him  and  the  rest  of  that  kingdom, 
stamping  itself  the  only  ground  or  earth  of  involution 
he  can  possibly  need,  for  the  subsequent  uses  of  his 
spiritual  or  characteristic  evolution. 

My  subjective  existence,  physical  and  moral,  is  in- 
volved in  my  spiritual  being,  just  as  the  shell  is 
involved  in  the  oyster,  the  egg  in  the  chicken,  the 
husk  in  the  wheat,  the  matrix  in  the  gem,  the  parent 
in  the  child :  that  is,  as  giving  it  not  substance  but 
surface,  not  being  but  background,  not  centre  but 
circumference,  not  inward  reality  but  outward  appari- 
tion, not  soul  but  body.  My  subjective  existence  in 
short  is  the  worthless,  perishable  ground  of  my  im- 
mortal spiritual  being.  Thus  involution  is  anything 
else  than  evolution.  It  is  the  direct  logical  opposite 
of  Evolution.  It  is  indeed  a  literal  and  strict  inver- 
sion of  it,  just  as  the  root  of  a  plant  is  an  inversion 
of  its  stem,  or  its  seed  an  inversion  of  its  fruit.  In- 
volution is  logically  proportionate  and  precedent  to 
Evolution,  as  earth  is  logically  proportionate  and  pre- 


222  DIFFERENCE  BETWEEN  THE  PHILOSOPHIC 

cedent  to  heaven ;  and  no  hypothesis  of  evolution  will 
ever  be  competent  to  furnish  a  pedigree  of  existence, 
unless  it  start  from  a  previous  philosophy  of  involu- 
tion. Thus  if,  as  many  self-constituted  partisans  of 
science  are  prone  to  believe,  monkey  evolves  man,  it 
can  only  be  by  virtue  of  man  first  involvinf/  monkey. 
And  to  account  for  man  therefore  on  monkey  prin- 
ciples, near  or  remote,  without  first  accounting  for 
monkey  on  distinctively  human  principles,  would  be 
to  leave  our  poor  ancestral  monkey  himself  unac- 
counted for :  that  is,  it  would  practically  be  to  deify 
him.  It  would  be  to  explain  being  by  existence,  the 
absolute  by  the  contingent,  substance  by  accident, 
church  by  steeple,  ship  by  sails,  house  by  cellar. 
Whatever  is  really  involved  in  any  existence  is  merely 
and  at  most  constitutional  to  it,  as  conditioning  its 
apparition,  and  is  not  the  least  essential  to  it,  as  con- 
ferring its  being.  My  various  viscera  are  no  doubt 
a  condition  of  my  physical  statics  ;  but  that  they  in 
the  least  degree  explain  my  moral  dynamics,  can  only 
be  affirmed  as  it  seems  to  me  by  wilful  fatuity. 
They  are  involved  in  my  physical  existence,  which  is 
itself  involved  in  my  moral  consciousness ;  so  that 
you  will  never  be  able  to  account  for  them,  until  you 
first  account  for  me,  independently  of  them. 

For,  per  contra,  whatsoever  is  evolved  by  any  exist- 
ing form,  is  itself  rigidly  creative  of  such  form  ;  that 


AND  THE  SCIENTIFIC  IDEA  OF  IT.  223 

is,  causes  it  to  exist  in  natiira  rerum.  So  that  to 
attempt  explaining  evolution  by  involution,  man  by 
monkey,  is  a  palpable  logical  dodge  or  quibble,  whose 
whole  force  consists  in  confounding  two  essentially  dis- 
crepant and  reciprocally  inverse  things,  namely  :  crea- 
tion and  constitution,  being  and  existence,  substance 
and  surface,  cause  and  condition,  spirit  and  flesh. 
Involution  is  to  evolution  precisely  what  shell  is  to 
oyster,  what  husk  is  to  wheat,  what  matrix  is  to  gem, 
what  parent  is  to  child  ;  and  to  explain  evolution  by 
involution,  therefore,  is  to  make  the  oyster  cradle  its 
shell,  the  wheat  nourish  its  husk,  the  gem  protect 
its  matrix,  the  child  support  its  parent ;  all  which  to 
the  eye  of  philosophy  constitutes  a  downright  witches' 
sabbath  of  science  ;  but  a  sabbath  nevertheless  which 
Mr.  Herbert  Spencer  and  the  so-called  positivists  gen- 
erally are  content  and  proud  to  sanctify.  To  think  of 
our  most  eminent  religiosi  being  frightened  by  these 
vagaries  of  our  modern  scientific  thought  !  What 
does  their  alarm  prove  ?  Certainly  little  or  nothing 
with  respect  to  the  object  of  it,  but  very  much  with 
respect  to  its  subjects.  For  it  proves  not  that  Pos- 
itivism, or  any  subtler  form  of  meditative  Atheism,  is 
any  way  dangerous  to  any  properly  human  interest, 
but  only  that  our  existing  religious  faith  is  every  way 
insecure,  being  founded  not  upon  the  rock  of  Truth, 
but  upon  the  shifting  sands  of  authorized  opinion. 


224      EVOLUTION  RELATIVELY  A  SPIRITUAL  FLOWER; 

Thus,  as  I  have  said,  evolution  is  an  every  way  fit- 
ting doctrine  wherewith  to  express  the  truth  of  spirit- 
ual creation,  provided  we  give  the  phenomenal  basis 
of  involution  which  it  claims  a  strictly  subject  posi- 
tion ;  or  make  Evolution  a  regenerate  spiritual  flower, 
and  Involution  its  natural  earthly  stem.  This  is  pre- 
cisely what  the  scientific  men  fail  to  do.  They  invari- 
ably put  the  cart  before  the  horse,  in  making  the  stem 
account  for  the  flower,  and  not  the  flower  for  the  stem, 
which  is  the  true  philosophic  order.  They  make  the 
earth  explain  heaven,  and  not  heaven  the  earth,  the 
body  explain  the  soul,  and  not  the  soul  the  body, 
physics  explain  morals,  and  not  morals  physics,  and 
thus  practically  outrage  all  the  deeper  and  finer 
instincts  of  humanity,  dogmatically  sundering  that 
exquisite  thread  of  tradition  which  in  the  absence  of 
positive  knowledge  has  hitherto  bound  men  in  intel- 
lectual and  qiiasi-sipmtual  unity.  The  obvious  phil- 
osophic objection  to  recent  scientific  speculations  is 
not  that  they  practically  tend  to  invalidate  the  current 
religious  dogmas  in  regard  to  creation,  which  they 
cannot  do  half  forcibly  enough  ;  but  that  they  substi- 
tute in  their  place  a  scientific  dogmatism  which  is  not 
half  so  respectable  in  itself,  to  begin  with,  and  which 
if  it  should  ever  become  established  in  popular  regard 
would  be  fatal  to  the  very  conception  of  creation,  and 
hence  to  the  spiritual  dignity  of  human  nature. 


INVOLUTION   ITS  NATURAL  STEM.  225 

Science  has  a  notable  function  in  the  world,  but  as 
I  have  already  said  it  is  an  intensely  humble  not  a 
commanding  one ;  an  abjectly  servile  not  a  leading 
function.  Its  name  is  Esau,  not  Jacob,  being  born 
of  the  bond  woman  not  of  the  free.  That  is  to  say, 
science  reflects  the  heart  still  in  bondage  to  the  intel- 
lect, while  philosophy  alone  expresses  the  intellect 
inspired  by  the  heart.  The  function  of  science  is  to 
observe  and  connote  the  actual  facts  of  existence,  in 
order  to  determine  the  mental  relation  of  unity  which 
binds  them  all  together ;  not  in  the  least  to  dogma- 
tize, or  build  up  a  philosophic  credo,  either  upon  the 
physical  facts  themselves,  or  the  logical  unity  with 
which  the  mind  invests  them.  In  ^\\ovi,  fact  and  the 
relations  affirmed  by  the  mind  amongst  facts,  is  the  field 
of  science.  Thus  it  is  scientifically  competent  to 
Newton  to  prove  that  the  elliptical  movement  of  the 
earth  around  the  sun  as  demonstrated  by  Kepler,  is 
due  to  the  attraction  exerted  by  the  sun  upon  the 
earth.  Eor  what  Newton  thus  does  is  simply  to 
establish  by  Kepler's  aid  a  hitherto  unrecognized  law 
of  planetary  life  or  intercourse.  And  it  is  perfectly 
competent  moreover  to  Mr.  Darwin,  in  the  point  of 
view  of  science,  to  collect  and  colligate,  under  any 
generic  law  of  unity  he  pleases  —  say  Natural  Selec- 
tion, Sexual  Selection,  or  both  together  —  whatsoever 
actual  facts  of  transmutation  he  may  have  observed  in 


226  SCIENCE  ESSENTIALLY   MINISTERIAL, 

existing  animal  and  vegetable  species.  Tor  what  he 
thus  does  is  simply  to  establish  and  announce  a  cer- 
tain spiritual  or  living  unity,  with  which  the  mind 
by  an  instinct  of  its  own  underlying  infinitude,  insists 
upon  filling  up  all  the  crevices  of  nature,  and  account- 
ing for  all  its  changes.  Mr.  Darwin  may,  to  be  sure, 
have  been  faithless  to  fact,  or  faithless  to  the  mind  : 
that  is  to  say,  his  observation  may  be  imperfect,  or  his 
generalization  premature  :  but  at  all  events  his  method 
is  thus  far  irreproachable.  But  when  any  one,  under 
cover  of  Mr.  Darwin's  name,  quietly  "  slips  over,"  as 
Aristotle  says,  "  into  another  kind,"  and  making  a 
fulcrum  of  his  induction  in  regard  to  the  existing  or 
fossil  variations  in  the  same  species,  applies  his  lever  to 
the  disclosure  of  the  origination  of  species,  he  at  once 
casts  off"  the  honest  livery  of  science,  and  converts 
himself  all  unconsciously  into  an  ambitious  dogma- 
tist. Mr.  Darwin  makes  it  scientifically  very  proba- 
ble that  natural  and  sexual  selection  account  for  all 
the  varieties  observable  within  our  existing  species. 
But  to  reason  hereupon  that  these  two  principles  are 
sufficient  to  account  for  the  origin  of  existing  species 
themselves,  is  not  to  reason  scientifically,  because  the 
reasoning  admits  of  absolutely  no  verification  in  fact. 
My  tailor  yields  a  sufficient  scientific  explanation  of  the 
differences  between  my  clothes  and  those  of  other  peo- 
ple ;  but  when  you  seek  a  philosophic  justification  of 


NOT  MAGISTERIAL  TO  THE  MIND.  227 

clothing  itself,  you  must  go  beyond  the  tailor.  It  is 
good  science  to  say  :  the  sartorial  art  originated  more 
or  less  all  the  varieties  we  observe  in  the  costume  of 
men  ;  certainly  all  those  variations  which  simply  im- 
ply advance  :  for  here  we  have  any  amount  of  well- 
attested  fact  to  sustain  us.  But  it  is  complete  recre- 
ancy to  science  to  say  hereupon  "  the  sartorial  art  also 
originates  clothing  itself  among  men  "  :  for  here  we 
have  absolutely  no  historic  fact  to  keep  us  in  counte- 
nance. 

Just  so  with  the  scientific  evolutionist.  The  basis 
of  his  speculation  here  is  not  fact  at  all,  but  pure 
fancy.  He  says  in  efiect :  "  I  conclude  that  natural 
and  sexual  selection  have  operated  all  the  changes  we 
observe  within  our  extant  species  of  existence,  and  be- 
tween some  of  these  species  again  and  certain  allied 
species  of  which  we  have  only  a  few  fossil  remainders  ; 
because  a  great  store  of  well-attested  facts  in  natural 
history  warrant  this  conclusion "  ;  and  this  is  good 
science.  But  now  he  proceeds  :  "  I  take  another  step, 
and  conclude,  from  the  adequacy  of  these  laws  to  ac- 
count for  specific  changes  in  existence,  that  they  are 
adequate  also  to  account  for  the  origination,  which  is 
the  creation  of  existence."  And  this  is  spurious  sci- 
ence. Why  ?  Simply  because  it  is  obviously  incapa- 
ble of  verification  by  any  fact  of  nature  or  of  history, 
and  depends  for  its  justification  upon  a  certain  bias 


228     NATURE  NEITHER  BEGINS  NOR  ENDS  ANYTHING, 

or  prejudice  of  the  man's  own  intellect,  and  upon  this 
exclusively. 

Nature  gives  us  absolutely  no  hint,  much  less  any 
distinct  affirmation,  in  respect  either  to  the  origin  or 
destiny  of  any  of  her  forms  or  species.  All  that  we 
see  in  nature  is  a  foreground  of  change  upon  a  back- 
ground of  stability,  thus  fixity  in  universals,  mutation 
in  particulars.  But  nothing  originates  and  nothing 
ends  in  nature.  Why  ?  Because  nature  is  not  being 
nor  even  existence,  but  only,  and  at  most,  appearance. 
Hence  all  of  nature's  forms  or  species  are  purely  rela- 
tive or  phenomenal ;  that  is  to  say,  they  presuppose 
an  intelligence  which  is  capable  of  comprehending 
them,  and  to  which  alone  they  exist.  And  the  scien- 
tific evolutionist  consequently,  in  so  far  forth  as  he 
invents  a  natural  origin  even  for  the  larvae  of  our  exist- 
ing marine  ascidians,  let  alone  for  the  mind  of  man 
itself,  proceeds  upon  a  total  misunderstanding  of  what 
nature  means,  and  so  turns  the  actual  truth  of  things 
upside  down.  In  fact  he  discharges  the  mind  of  all 
freedom  or  life  ;  for  he  makes  nature  no  longer  the 
obedient  mirror  of  truth,  but  its  absolute  source  and 
arbiter. 


LETTER     XVIII. 


tY  DEAR  FRIEND  :  — Let  me  say  again, 
in  simple  justice  to  myself,  that  I  have  no 
shadow  of  objection  to  the  new  scientific 
dogma,  in  so  far  as  it  is  purely  negative; 
that  is,  bears  upon  the  stagnant  religious  faiths  of  the 
world.  Doubt  or  denial  is  the  legitimate  weapon  of 
scientific  advance.  And  our  present  science  is,  I  appre- 
hend, only  an  indispensable  John  the  Baptist  blindly 
preparing  the  way,  and  proclaiming  the  advent,  of  a 
new,  or  a  spiritual  and  living  faith :  which  it  does 
by  vastating  the  active  intellect  of  men  of  its  dead 
faiths.  Accordingly  in  so  far  as  our  recent  bellicose 
science  goes  to  discredit  an  historic  or  literal  creation, 
I  have  no  quarrel  with  it.  For  I  see  in  it  only  the 
augury  of  a  new  faith,  based  upon  a  profounder  ac- 
knowledgment of  creation,  as  being  no  preposterous 
physical  exploit  of  God  accomplished  in  the  realms  of 
space  and  time,  but  a  wholly  spiritual  operation  of  Ilis 
power  in  the  realms  of  human  affection  and  thought. 


230  THE   FORTE  AND   FOIBLE   OF   SCIENCE. 

Thus  it  is  altogether  in  their  positive  aspect  that  I 
pretend  to  any  quarrel  with  our  recent  scientific  dog- 
matics. When  science,  disdaining  the  humble  but 
honorable  office  of  ministering  to  a  new  intellectual 
faith  and  a  new  spiritual  life  in  man,  assumes  itself 
to  constitute  or  even  forecast  such  faith  and  life,  she 
is  no  longer  amiable  nor  respectable,  and  invites  as 
it  seems  to  me  a  just  disclaimer  on  the  part  of  the 
outraged  common  sense  of  mankind. 

The  forte  of  science,  be  it  always  remembered,  is 
reflection,  or  reasoned  observation ;  and  these  things 
are  plainly  possible  to  man  only  in  so  far  as  his  feet 
are  planted  in  a  fixed  physical  or  organic  world  exist- 
ing objectively  or  outwardly  to  his  senses.  Now 
reflection  being  the  proper  forte  of  science,  or  the 
mode  of  industry  whereby  she  thrives,  I  hope  it  will 
be  allowed  me  to  ask  what  is  her  consequent  foible, 
or  the  mode  of  activity  by  which  she  dwindles  ?  The 
foible  of  science,  then,  reflection  being  her  forte,  is 
perception,  or  spiritual  insight;  which  is  possible 
to  man  only  in  so  far  as  his  head  dwells  in  a  free, 
inorganic,  ethereal,  or  metaphysical  world  existing 
inwardly  or  subjectively  to  his  affections.  Now, 
such  being  the  forte,  and  such  the  foible,  of  science, 
it  follows  naturally  enough  to  the  eye  of  philosophy, 
that  i\\Q  punctam  saliens  both  of  her  reflective  strength 
and  her  perceptive  weakness  should  be,  as  I  have  be- 


NATURE'S  FIRST  LESSON  TO  THE  INTELLECT.      231 

fore  alleged,  a  certain  ontological  illusion  which  she 
shares  with  the  mass  of  uninstructed  men,  in  regard 
to  the  natural  constitution  of  things  :  or  all  simply  the 
constitution  of  nature.  Accordingly  let  us  look  into 
this. 

We  give  the  designation  of  Nature  to  the  outlying 
universe,  or  world  of  things  existing  to  sense.  Now 
what  is  the  earliest  and  deepest  intellectual  lesson 
we  derive  from  this  world  of  sense  ?  It  is  that  every- 
thing embraced  in  it  exists  really  in  a  composite  man- 
ner, however  much  it  may  seem  to  exist  in  a  simple 
or  absolute  one.  The  reason  of  this  discrepancy  be- 
tween the  rational  truth  and  the  sensible  fact  of  the 
case  is,  doubtless,  the  infirmity  of  the  created  intelli- 
gence :  ive  the  dependenis  of  nature,  who  get  our  high- 
est knowledge  exclusively  from  the  gradual  revelation 
she  gives  of  the  Divine  goodness  and  truth,  hring  to 
her  observation  and  study  first  of  all  a  simple,  and  then 
a  cow2)osite  faculty  of  attention ;  and  she  miraculously 
adjusts  herself  to  our  need.  Thus  we  first  apprehend 
nature  by  sense,  and  only  afterwards  learn  to  appre- 
hend it  by  the  understanding.  The  exigency  of  our 
senses  imposes  upon  everything  that  exists  an  appar- 
ently absolute,  that  is,  a  fixed  or  finite,  quality,  which 
the  thing  is  thought  to  possess  in  itself,  or  quite  irre- 
spectively of  all  other  things.  But  our  reason  or 
understanding  subsequently  enables  us  to  convert  this 


232  DIFFERENCE  BETWEEN   PHYSICAL 

absolute  or  fixed  quality  of  existence,  which  it  appar- 
ently possesses  in  itself,  into  a  relative,  unfixed,  or 
contingent  quality  which  it  possesses  only  in  relation 
to  other  things.  That  is  to  say,  we  first  apprehend 
the  thing  as  a  purely  physical  existence,  and  after- 
wards rise  to  the  conception  of  it  as  a  natural  exist- 
ence. The  first  or  sensuous  aspect  of  the  world  pre- 
sents us  everything  in  a  purely  selfish,  personal,  or 
phenomenal  point  of  view  ;  the  second  or  rational 
aspect  of  it  alone  exhibits  everything  as  existing  in  a 
purely  relative,  or  associated,  and  harmonious  light. 
A  horse,  for  example,  happens  at  this  moment  to  be 
tied  before  my  door.  This  horse,  I  repeat,  is  an  ab- 
solute or  fixed  fact  of  sense,  entirely  distinct  from  all 
other  facts ;  so  fixed  or  absolute,  that  to  dispute  or 
deny  it  would  be  equivalent  to  disputing  or  denying 
the  competence  of  my  senses  in  their  own  sphere. 
But  notwithstanding  that  the  horse  is  this  absolute 
or  fixed  fact  to  my  senses,  you  yourself  will  agree  with 
me  that  he  has  no  existence  to  my  reason  out  of  re- 
lation to  all  other  horses.  That  is  to  say  :  while  he 
apparently  exists  in  himself  alone,  or  as  an  individual 
horse,  he  in  very  truth  exists  only  in  solidarity  with 
his  kind.  And  so  with  all  other  things  in  the  realm 
of  sense. 

Now  what  I  want  hereupon  to  point  out  to  your 
attention  in  the  first  place,  is  a  truth  which  perhaps 


AND  NATURAL  EXISTENCE.  233 

you  never  have  thought  of  before,  namely ;  that  this 
relative  existence  of  things  —  the  existence  they  have 
in  relation  to  all  other  things  —  alone  stamps  them 
natural ;  while  their  absolute  or  individual  existence 
—  the  apparent  existence  they  have  in  themselves  — 
is  a  grossly  fallacious  or  unreal  thing,  in  total  contra- 
diction to  the  constitution  of  nature.  To  be  sure  it 
is  only  a  judgment  of  our  infirm  or  imperfect  sense 
that  things  have  this  absolute  or  fixed  individuality. 
Nothing  claims  it  but  man  ;  but  because  he,  inspired 
by  sense  and  uncontrolled  by  reason,  affects  selfhood, 
he  does  not  hesitate  to  bestow  it  also  in  modified  form 
upon  all  other  existence.  All  other  things  utterly  dis- 
claim it  in  fact ;  and  it  is  only  the  profound  halluci- 
nation which  he  cherishes  in  regard  to  himself  as  in- 
volving his  own  being  and  existence,  that  ever  leads 
him  to  invest  them  also  in  their  degree  with  selfhood, 
reckoning  their  innocent  persons  in  fact  good  and 
evil,  and  subjecting  them  to  reward  and  punishment, 
as  they  stand  affected  to  his  dubious  and  very  wilful 
supremacy. 

I  said  just  now  that  this  absolute  or  individual 
aspect  of  things,  the  aspect  they  have  of  existing  in 
themselves,  and  irrespectively  of  other  things,  was 
grossly  unnatural :  "  in  total  contradiction  to  the 
constitution  of  nature."  Nature,  to  our  conception, 
is  a  composite  existence  made  up  of  an  objective  and 


234  THE   PHILOSOPHER  HAS  NO  CALL 

subjective  unity.  That  is  to  say,  it  is  the  strict  unity 
in  all  its  subjects  of  a  pubhc  and  a  private,  or  a  com- 
mon and  a  proper,  force.  It  embraces  two  elements, 
one  universal  the  other  particular,  one  statical  the 
other  dynamical,  one  material,  in  short,  the  other 
spiritual ;  and  these  two  elements  moreover  are  most 
distinctly  one  or  united,  so  that  however  easily  we 
may  divorce  them  in  thought  or  reflectively,  they  are 
never  separable  in  fact,  A  really  absolute,  finite,  or 
independent  existence,  save  as  a  fallacy  of  the  human 
mind,  is  disavowed  by  the  nature  of  things,  and  we 
may  safely  dismiss  it  from  rational  regard  therefore. 
There  is  no  such  existence  out  of  our  infirm  under- 
standing, and  no  subjective  pretension  to  it  outside  of 
hell,  which  fairly  lives  and  grows  fat  upon  the  hallu- 
cinations bred  of  it.  But  I  admit  that  natiu-e  out^ 
wardly  vieived  does  wear  the  appearance  of  being 
almost  wholly  made  up  of  these  absolute  or  finite 
and  independent  existences.  Bitt  what  business  have 
we,  as  philosophers,  to  be  cavght  loohdng  at  nature  out- 
loardly  ?  This  in  fact  is  just  my  complaint  in  the 
premises,  that  we  should  be  so  long  philosophically 
content  to  view  nature  as  an  outward  thing,  or  as  she 
stands  revealed  to  sense,  when  she  herself  prays  to  be 
regarded  inwardly  alone,  or  as  she  reveals  herself  to 
our  understanding:  that  is,  to  be  regarded  no  more 
as  mineral,  vegetable,  and  animal,  but  as  exclusively 


TO  LOOK  AT   NATURE   OUTWARDLY.  235 

human.  It  is  only  an  inveterate  sensuous  fatuity  on 
our  part  which  leads  us  to  mistake  the  mere  sensible 
or  physical  appearances  of  things  for  their  funda- 
mental natural  or  rational  realities.  And  there  is  no 
way  of  correcting  the  mistake  but  by  outgrowing  this 
fatal  intellectual  fatuity  ;  that  is,  by  at  once  manfully 
deposing  sense  from  the  governing  or  inspiring  rela- 
tion it  now  bears  to  the  intellect,  and  remanding  it 
forthwith  to  a  wholly  ministerial  or  subordinate  place. 
Believe  me,  my  friend,  it  is  nothing  but  this  subtle 
and  insinuating  serpent  of  sense  (rightly  so  named  in 
sacred  or  symbolic  writ)  which  —  appealing  to  the 
woman  in  us,  that  is,  the  still  latent  or  unrecognized 
spiritual  Divine  force  in  our  nature  —  has  ever  had 
power  so  to  falsify  and  otherwise  bedevil  our  intelli- 
gence as  to  make  us  look  upon  creation  as  a  material 
or  sensibly  objective  work  of  God,  detached  from  Him 
by  the  laws  of  space  and  time,  instead  of  a  piu-ely 
spiritual  or  inwardly  subjective  one,  intimately  blent 
with  His  eternal  Love  and  Wisdom  through  the  laws 
of  our  own  nature  or  the  life  of  our  affection  and 
thought.  It  is  simply  this  stultifying  pressure  of 
sense  upon  the  intellect  that  has  always  until  now 
rendered  it  intellectually  impossible  for  us  to  identify 
our  own  honest  natural  manhood,  let  alone  our  Divine 
natural  one.  Have  you  not  under  the  guidance  of 
sense  always  looked  upon  your  natural  manhood  as 


236  SCIENCE   HAS  NO   PERCEPTION 

at  bottom  physically  engendered?  That  is  to  say, 
as  engendered  out  of  the  various  limitations  you  de- 
rive from  your  mineral,  vegetable,  and  animal  organi- 
zation ?  You  have  never  thought  —  have  you  ?  — 
that  your  natural  manhood  was  what  forever  lifted 
you  out  of  mineral,  vegetable,  and  animal  relation- 
ship, and  rendered  you  eternally  solidaire  with  man- 
kind. Much  more,  if  you  have  ever  considered  the 
truth  of  a  Divine  natural  manhood  at  all,  you  have 
thought  —  have  you  not  ?  —  that  it  was  altogether 
perso7ially  constituted  :  that  is,  constituted  by  a  person 
of  another  nature  to  ours,  acting  in  fact  in  total  aloof- 
ness from,  and  independence  of,  your  and  mine  and 
all  men's  common  nature,  instead  of  identifying  him- 
self exclusively  with  that  nature,  and  glorifying  it  to 
Divine  dimensions.  Personality  has  never  been  any- 
thing else  than  a  mark  which  we  stupid  men  have 
required  to  assure  us  of  our  natural  difference  from 
mineral,  vegetable,  and  animal,  although  we  ourselves 
have  none  the  less  always  contrived  stupidly  to  in- 
terpret it  into  a  providential  signal  of  the  natural 
relation  of  disunion  or  inequality  we  were  under  to 
our  fellow-men.  Accordingly  when  the  Divine  natu- 
ral humanity  condescends  to  reveal  itself  in  personal 
form,  we  may  be  sure  that  it  is  for  no  purpose  of 
living  to  that  form  but  only  of  dying  to  it,  in  order 
that  men  may  cease  any  longer  to  find  their  life  in 


OF  THE  SPIRITUAL  ENDS   OF  NATURE,  237 

what  merely  differences  them  from  lower  natm'es,  and 
seek  it  henceforth  in  all  that  identifies  them  with  their 
own  nature,  now  become  Divine. 

But  I  am  forgetting  my  purpose,  which  was  to 
show  a  certain  ontologic  craze  on  the  part  of  science, 
which  rendering  her  view  of  nature  hopelessly  infirm 
or  inadequate  except  for  isoteric  or  shop  purposes, 
utterly  defeats  her  educational  competence. 

This  craze  consists  all  simply  in  looking  upon 
nature  as  a  fixed  or  finite  existence,  thus  as  materially 
constituted,  as  being  in  short  a  strict  phenomenon  of 
space  and  time.  It  is  all  very  well,  mind,  nay,  it 
is  a  matter  of  stern  necessity,  to  regard  nature  as 
materially  or  outwardly  constituted  to  our  senses.  For 
inasmuch  as  nature  is  a  purely  metaphysic  quantity, 
it  is  evident  that  she  can  only  be  reflected  to  our  un- 
derstanding through  the  obedient  mirror  of  physics. 
Her  existence  then  to  our  recognition  must  be  con- 
ditioned upon  fixed  or  sensibly  objective  relations 
between  mineral,  vegetable,  and  animal  substance  ; 
otherwise  it  will  be  impossible  for  us  ever  to  appre- 
hend her,  ever  to  catch  even  a  glimpse  of  her  living 
and  glorified  presence.  But  this  is  not  what  science, 
at  least  in  the  person  of  her  more  renowned  modern 
adepts,  means.  She  does  not  hold  that  nature  is  de- 
pendent for  her  intellectual  recognition  by  us  on  a 
certain  objective  or  material  imagery  addressed  pri- 


238  AND  THEREFORE  CONFOUNDS 


marily  to  our  senses,  and  through  them  to  our  under- 
standing. By  no  means.  She  holds  that  nature  is 
actually  identical  with  this  physical  imagery,  and  has 
neither  conceivable  being  nor  existence  apart  from 
the  unconscious  forms  which  to  a  more  instructed  eye 
simply  reveal  her  perfections.  This  is  why  I  called 
this  illusion  a  craze  on  the  part  of  science.  Surely 
you  would  think  a  man  out  of  his  wits  who  should 
identify  himself  with  his  image  in  a  glass.  And  I 
in  like  manner  deem  science  out  of  her  wits  when 
she  identifies  the  mistress  she  professes  to  worship 
with  the  perishable  mirror  that  reflects  her.  These 
objective  or  material  facts,  which  so  gravel  and  im- 
pede the  onward  march  of  science,  are  nothing,  as 
we  have  seen,  but  idtimates  of  Divine  order,  in  the 
sphere  of  sense ;  just  as  bricks  and  mortar  are  ulti- 
mates  in  the  same  sphere  of  architectural  order.  You 
would  not  rate  very  high  a  man's  genius  who  should 
pretend  to  deduce  the  architectural  order  of  the  Par- 
thenon from  the  stone  and  lime  and  water  which 
nevertheless  gave  it  its  sole  material  basis  ?  So  too 
you  would  not  feel  constrained  to  put  a  high  estimate 
upon  the  conceited  science,  which — because  it  is  able 
to  lay  a  profane  or  familiar  hand  upon  these  mere 
bases,  or  material  ultimates,  of  Divine  order  in  human 
nature  —  irreverently  supposes  that  it  has  got  within 
its  grasp  the  ineffable  spiritual  results  of  that  order  ? 


NATURE  WITH   PHYSICS.  239 

If  SO,  I  should  feel  painfully  constrained  in  my  turn 
not  to  put  a  very  high  estimate  upon  your  philosophic 
sagacity. 

Spiritual  creation  cannot  possibly  be  understood 
save  in  so  far  as  the  spiritual  or  created  subject  is 
seen  to  be  invested  incidentally  with  natural  consti- 
tution. His  person  must  be  seen  to  be  naturally 
constituted,  in  order  to  give  him  conscious  projection 
from  God,  and  make  anything,  even  existence,  truly 
predicable  of  him.  For  spiritual  creation,  you  re- 
member, is  purely  subjective  creation ;  that  is,  the 
creator  gives  being  to  the  creature  only  by  giving 
Himself  to  him,  or  endowing  him  with  his  own  infi- 
nite substance.  But  no  mere  person,  much  less  all 
persons,  would  be  equal  to  this  Divine  communi- 
cation, unless  it  incidentally  provided,  or  involved  in 
itself,  a  natural  or  objective  development  on  the  part 
of  the  creature  to  give  him  background  or  a  basis  of 
identity ;  otherwise  it  must  instantly  collapse  or  turn 
out  a  false  pretension.  There  would  be  no  created 
object  at  all  commensurate  with  the  creative  subject ; 
and  creation  consequently,  which,  to  begin  with,  is  a 
strict  equation  between  creator  and  creature,  would 
fall  through,  or  confess  itself  impossible  from  the 
start.  This  is  all  that  Swedenborg  means  by  his  doc- 
trine of  natural  ultimates  as  incidental  to  spiritual 
creation.     It  is  a  doctrine  which,  for  the  first  time  in 


240  IT  CLAIMS  THAT  NATURAL  EXISTENCE 

the  philosophic  annals  of  the  mind,  not  only  accounts 
for  Nature,  and  perfectly  accounts  for  it  too,  but 
brings  the  dread  and  formidable  spiritual  world  itself 
into  our  own  keeping,  as  it  were,  by  harnessing  it  and 
taming  it  down  to  the  phenomena  of  men's  familiar 
natural  history.  Any  other  doctrine  would  turn  the 
creator  into  a  mere  magician,  or  supreme  charlatan, 
making  everything  out  of  nothing,  and  so  avouching 
himself  infinitely  below  not  merely  any  renoAvned  art- 
ist, but  any  honest  stone-mason.  Tor  the  mason's  art 
does  n't  pretend  to  make  bricks  without  straw,  or  sub- 
jective existence  without  any  objective  implication, 
but  finds  its  ultimation  also  in  things  most  real  and 
tangible  to  our  senses,  whereby  alone  it  is  that  we  are 
never  liable  to  mistake  it  for  a  mere  creation  of  the 
fata  morgana. 

Now  it  would  be  by  no  means  remarkable  if  science 
should  be  content  to  fix  her  regard  exclusively  upon 
this  constitutive  sphere  of  things,  thus  objectively  in- 
volved in  the  spiritual  or  subjective  creation.  For 
this  outwardly  objective  sphere  of  things  constitutes 
the  true  and  legitimate  field  of  her  activity,  furnishes 
her  with  her  sole  raison  d'etre  in  fact ;  and  within 
that  sphere  accordingly  none  can  gainsay  her  voice. 
But  she  is  not  thus  content  in  point  of  fact.  Some 
busy  imp  from  some  dusky  hell  of  ambition  has  bitten 
her  Avith  an  unfortunate  desire  to  dogmatize,  or  take 


IS   IDENTICAL  WITH  SPIRITUAL  BEING.  241 

captive  the  realm  of  faith  in  man ;  that  is  to  say,  the 
field  of  his  interior  knowledge  as  well  as  his  external. 
This  is  the  only  reason  why  I  have  allowed  myself  to 
call  her  craze  an  ontologic  one.  It  does  not  confine 
itself  to  speculating  upon  existence,  but  assuming 
apparently  that  natural  existence  is  the  same  thing 
with  spiritual  being,  it  undertakes  authoritatively  to 
check  or  limit  what  is  by  what  sensibly  appears  fo  be ; 
or  array  natural  constitution  ar/ainst  spiritual  creation. 
Thus  where  Swedenborg  says  that  all  natural  existence 
is  created  by  a  soul  of  use  behind  it  —  use  to  other 
and  higher  things  —  our  modern  science  afiirms  that 
all  natural  existence  is  constituted  by  some  primary 
natural  substance,  say  protoplasm,  and  that  there  is 
an  end  of  the  matter.  There  can  be  no  objection  of 
course  to  the  scientific  man's  attempt  to  reduce  if  he 
can  all  organized  existence  to  a  common  basis  ;  but 
the  objection  comes  in  when  he  attempts  to  make  any 
formula  of  his  on  this  grossly  gratuitous  and  imper- 
tinent subject,  of  vital  concern  to  philosophy.  For 
in  doing  this  he  at  once  betrays  his  crass  ignorance 
of  what  philosophy  means,  confounding,  for  example, 
every  concept  that  is  proper  and  dear  to  it  with  its 
exact  opposite,  mdividualift/  with  identity,  life  with 
existence,  form  with  substance,  cause  with  condition, 
creation  with  constitution.  Philosophy  is  perfectly  in- 
different  to  what   naturally  constitutes   existence   or 


242  PROFESSOR  HUXLEY 

gives  it  outward  body,  but  reserves  all  her  interest 
for  what  spiritually  creates  it,  or  gives  it  inward  soul. 
To  misconceive  and  misrepresent  this,  however,  is  the 
inveterate  temptation  of  clever  scientific  men,  and  the 
infirmity  has  never  been  more  aptly  illustrated  than 
in  the  developments  of  our  recent  scientific  material- 
ism. "  Pursue,"  says  Professor  Huxley,  "  the  nettle 
and  the  oak,  the  midge  and  the  mammoth,  the  infant 
and  the  adult,  Shakespeare  and  Cahban,  to  their  com- 
mon root,  and  you  have  protoplasm  for  your  pains. 
Beyond  this  analysis  science  cannot  go ;  and  any 
metaphysic  of  existence  consequently  which  is  not 
fast  tethered  to  this  physical  substance,  which  is  not 
firmly  anchored  in  protoplasm,  is  an  affront  to  the 
scientific  understanding." 

Such  in  substance  is  Professor  Huxley's  attitude  to- 
wards philosophy.  Professor  Huxley  is  consciously  no 
doubt  a  very  independent  man,  and  an  uncommonly 
able  writer ;  but  it  seems  to  me  very  odd,  to  say  the 
least,  that  any  one  interested  not  in  the  pursuit  of 
scientific  knowledge  primarily,  but  of  philosophic 
truth,  should  be  at  all  moved,  and  especially  at  all 
disconcerted,  by  his  facts  :  for  whether  they  be  scien- 
tifically valid  or  not,  they  are  properly  irrelevant  to 
philosophy.  Like  Mr.  Spencer,  M.  Taine,  and  all 
the  other  men  who  desire  not  only  to  make  science 
the   king,  but  also  to  invest  it  with  the  priesthood 


AS  A  PHILOSOPHER.  243" 

of  the  mind,  Professor  Huxley  restricts  his  researches 
to  the  principle  of  identity  in  existence  —  that  point 
in  which  all  existence  becomes  essentially  chaotic  or 
substantially  indistinguishable.  The  philosopher,  on 
the  other  hand,  who  sees  science  to  be  not  the  end 
but  the  means  of  the  mind's  ultimate  enfranchisement, 
enlarges  his  researches  to  the  principle  of  individual- 
ity in  existence,  or  that  comprehensive  spiritual  unity 
in  which  all  existence  becomes  essentially  cosmical, 
or  formally  differentiated  inter  se.  Far  be  it  from  me 
to  question  Mr.  Huxley's  statistics,  for  I  know  noth- 
ing about  them  ;  I  only  question,  nay  I  am  heartily 
amused  by,  the  extravagant  intellectual  conclusions 
he  deduces  from  them.  I  have  no  doubt,  on  his  own 
showing,  that  the  initial  fact  in  all  organization  is 
protoplasm.  But  at  the  same  time  I  avow  myself 
unable  to  conceive  a  fact  of  less  vital  significance 
to  philosophy.  Fhilosopliij  cheerfully  takes  that  and 
every  similar  fact  of  science  for  yr  anted.  The  initial 
fact  in  the  edifice  of  St.  Peter's  at  Rome  was  a  quan- 
tity of  stone  and  lime.  This  fact  was  assumed  by 
the  architect  as  necessarily  included  in  the  form  of 
his  edifice,  about  which  form  alone  he  was  concerned. 
The  identity  of  his  edifice,  or  what  it  possessed  of 
common  substance  with  all  other  buildings,  interested 
him  very  little ;  only  its  individuality,  or  what  it 
should   possess   of  differential  form  from   all   other 


244  WHAT   PROTOPLASM   SYMBOLIZES 

buildings,  was  what  exercised  his  imagination.  To 
conceive  of  Michael  Angelo  concerning  himself  mainly 
with  the  rude  protoplasm,  or  mere  flesh  and  bones, 
of  his  building,  is  at  once  to  reduce  him  from  an 
architect  to  a  mason.  And,  in  like  manner,  to  con- 
ceive the  philosopher  intent  upon  running  man's  im- 
mortal destiny,  or  spiritual  form,  into  the  abject  slime 
out  of  which  his  body  germinates,  is  to  reduce  him 
from  a  philosopher  to  a  noodle. 

Protoplasm  means  intellectual  chaos ;  means  the 
resolution  of  the  existing  cosmos  into  absolute  form- 
lessness or  disorder.  That  is  to  say :  you  cannot 
arrive  at  protoplasm  experimentally  or  livingly,  ex- 
cept by  disowning  our  present  cosmical  form  and 
order,  except  by  eliminating  all  that  you  organically 
are,  with  all  that  is  contingent  upon  your  organiza- 
tion, namely :  all  your  experience  of  life  and  con- 
sciousness, every  fact  of  appetite  and  emotion,  of 
reason  and  imagination,  of  passion  and  action,  every- 
thing, in  short,  that  constitutes  you  a  living  person 
and  so  stamps  you  of  the  slightest  moment  to  phi- 
losophy. Protoplasm,  in  truth,  as  an  intellectual 
symbol,  means  the  extinguishing  of  the  soul  or  life 
or  being  of  things,  and  the  permission  of  mere  bodily 
existence  to  them,  without  any  source  either  for  them 
to  exist,  or  go  forth,  from,  but  what  is  essentially  in- 
ferior to  themselves.     For  no  one  will  pretend  that 


TO  THE   INTELLECT.  245 

protoplasm,  or  the  forniless  unqualified  material  of 
things,  is  any  way  comparable  in  intellectual  interest 
with  the  least  of  its  formed  or  qualified  products. 
Nevertheless,  to  such  absolute  drivel  does  the  man 
of  science  reduce  himself  when  he  aspires,  on  scien- 
tific (/rounds,  to  play  the  philosopher !  And  such  is 
the  invariable  penalty  of  violating  spiritual  bounds. 
The  realm  of  Philosophy  is  invariably  soul,  or  inward 
consciousness  ;  the  realm  of  science  is,  as  invariably, 
body,  or  outward  sense.  And  although  it  is  past  all 
dispute  that  these  two  realms  stand  to  each  other  in 
the  relation  of  superstructure  and  base,  it  is  none  the 
less  but  all  the  more  true  that  while  the  former  is  in- 
deed oidwardly  conditioned  upon  the  latter,  the  latter 
is  inwardly  created  by  the  former ;  and  hence  that  the 
higher  realm  of  soul  is  no  more  continuous  with  the 
lower  realm  of  body,  than  a  house  is  continuous  with 
its  foundation,  or  a  tree  Avhich  fdls  the  air  with  bloom 
and  fragrance  is  continuous  with  its  underground 
roots.  The  roots  of  the  tree  are  a  mere  involution  of 
the  tree  in  order  to  its  subsequent  evolution,  and  any 
expansion  they  may  attain  to  is  not  in  the  direction 
of  the  tree,  but  in  a  contrary  or  inverse  direction,  that 
of  the  earth.  The  foundation  of  the  house  in  like 
manner  is  so  wholly  subservient  to  the  house,  that 
every  subsequent  enlargement  it  may  chance  to  un- 
dergo in  itself,  will  only  enhance  such  subserviency 


246  PHYSICISM  A  PROVIDENTIAL  GOSPEL. 

by  carrying  the  foundation  deeper,  that  is  away  from 
the  house  rather  than  towards  it. 

Notwithstanding  all  I  have  said,  however,  I  have 
not  the  least  doubt  that  the  gospel  of  physicism  is  a 
strictly  providential  movement  in  our  mental  history. 
I  have  no  doubt  that  in  thus  making  as  it  does  tabula 
rasa,  or  a  clean  sweep,  of  our  sensuous  or  inherited 
ontology,  it  does  unwitting  good  service  to  the  mind 
in  clearing  the  ground  for  a  new  and  purely  spir- 
itual conception  of  being  or  life.  Idealism  seems  in 
fact  a  gross  but  inevitable  husk  of  the  mind's  spirit- 
ual advent.  But  its  role  is  essentially  critical :  that 
is,  it  is  not  the  least  rightfully  dogmatic.  And  noth- 
ing can  be  more  insane,  therefore,  than  to  regard  the 
new  dogmatism  as  constituting  the  positive  boon  to 
the  intellect  which  it  ignorantly  assumes  to  do.  Our 
intelligence  is  built  not  upon  negation  but  affirma- 
tion, and  the  current  scientific  idealism  is  at  best  but 
a  transition  point  between  the  once  active  but  always 
baseless  and  now  defunct  metaphysics  of  theology, 
and  that  philosophic  naturalism  or  realism  which  is 
even  now  looming  in  our  intellectual  horizon,  and 
ready  to  avouch  itself  the  fixed  immovable  earth  of 
the  mind,  the  adamantine  rock  of  man's  spiritual 
faith  and  hope. 


LETTER     XIX. 


rND  now,  my  dear  friend,  we  are  almost 
ready  to  take  up  the  thread  of  discourse 
we  dropped,  in  reference  to  the  function 
of  the  church  in  history :  almost  ready,  but  not 
quite.  For  I  think  a  little  further  effort  should  first 
be  made  perfectly  to  familiarize  your  thought  with 
Swedenborg's  philosophy  of  nature  as  being  a  strictly 
necessary  involution  of  the  spiritual  creation.  Noth- 
ing short  of  clear  conceptions  on  this  subject  will  per- 
manently avail  to  free  the  mind  from  the  rubbish  of 
inane  and  idle  ontologic  speculation  which  now  threat- 
ens to  drown  it  out. 

The  intellectual  formula  to  which  the  truth  of  the 
spiritual  creation  with  its  marvellous  implication  of 
nature  reduces  itself,  may  be  thus  expressed :  The 
created  subject,  in  order  to  his  subjective  life  or  con- 
sciousness being  perfectly  authenticated,  requires  that  it 
be  altogether  outwardly  or  objectively  realized,  or  claim 
a  supremely  natural  root.     The  justification   of  this 


248  SWEDENBORG'S  PHILOSOPHY 

intellectual  formula,  or  law  of  thought,  is  to  be  found 
in  the  very  nature  of  creation  ;  which,  as  being  the 
operation  of  an  infinite  power,  cut  off  therefore  from 
all  outside  resources,  is  restricted  to  purely  subjective 
issues  ;  and  hence,  in  order  spiritually  to  qualify  its 
creatiu"e,  or  redeem  him  from  the  sheer  and  abject 
phenomenal  subjectivity  to  which  as  a  creature  he  is 
doomed,  is  obliged  to  endow  him  thereupon  with  a 
career  of  distinctively  natural  evolution,  which  may 
serve  as  a  true  and  objective  basis  of  his  eventual 
spiritual  enfranchisement.  Creation  of  course  is  the 
prerogative  of  an  infinite  being ;  but  we  are  in  the 
habit  of  borrowing  the  word  to  characterize  the  prod- 
ucts of  our  own  aesthetic  genius  or  free  activity. 
Thus  we  say  Hamlet  is  a  creation  of  Shakespeare, 
Dante  created  the  Inferno,  the  Parthenon  divides  its 
creation  between  Callicrates  and  Phidias,  the  artist 
creates  the  statue.  Now,  of  course,  regarded  strictly, 
it  is  not  a  just  use  of  the  word  to  employ  it  simply 
in  the  way  of  characterizing  our  unforced  or  sponta- 
neous activity ;  because  it  is  essential  to  the  creative 
idea  that  the  creator  give  spiritual  or  living  form  to 
His  creature  only  by  Himself  first  furnishing  him 
with  natural  or  mother-substance.  And  Shakespeare, 
Dante,  and  the  rest,  may  worry  themselves  out  of 
their  meagre  wits,  before  they  will  ever  be  able  any 
of  them  to  endow  the  products  of  their  distinctive 


OF  NATURE.  249 


genius  with  anything  more  than  a  purely  lifeless  or 
imaginative  existence ;  for  with  all  their  genius  they 
can  never  bestow  upon  its  offspring  natural  subjectiv- 
ity 01*  mother-substance. 

Still  we  may  get  a  very  good  hypothetical  illustra- 
tion out  of  the  word  even  in  this  familiar  misuse  of  it. 
Let  us  suppose  then  that  the  artist  were  a  veritable 
creator,  and  had  power  accordingly  to  give  his  statue 
subjective  or  conscious  life  by  himself  spiritually 
vivifying  the  marble  from  which  it  comes.  In  that 
case  one  thing  would  be  at  once  clear,  and  that  is, 
that  the  statue  would  be  no  longer  as  now  a  dead 
material  form,  but  a  conscious  or  quasi-liwmg  one, 
instinct,  no  doubt,  through  its  vivified  mother-sub- 
stance with  all  its  creator's  genius.  But  another 
thing  would  be  almost  equally  clear,  and  that  is,  that 
he  would  never  be  able  to  reproduce  that  genius  in 
himself.  Why  not  ?  Because  this  ability  would  pre- 
suppose in  the  statue  a  certain  interior  or  sympathetic 
discernment  and  appreciation  of  its  creator's  genius, 
whereas  he  is  as  yet,  by  the  hypothesis  of  his  finite 
maternal  genesis,  debarred  all  interior  or  sympathetic 
experience,  and  made  conscious  alone  of  his  own 
material  or  outward  existence.  By  the  necessity  of 
his  finite  generation  he  is  ignorant  not  only  of  his 
creator's  genius  or  individuality,  but  also  of  his  crea- 
tor's name  or  identity  ;  ignorant  in  fact  of  everything 


250         GOOD  AND  EVIL  THE  MERE 

but  his  mother-substance,  and  the  outward  Hfe  and 
sustenance  wherewith  it  fills  his  veins.  It  is  indeed 
evident  to  the  least  reflection  that  this  self-conscious 
life  of  the  statue  —  the  self-conscious  or  qudsi-Yih 
he  derives  from  the  mother  —  instead  of  spiritually 
approximating  him  to  the  father,  will  have  the  effect 
in  the  first  instance  to  render  him  spiritually  remote 
from  the  father,  or  spiritually  alienate  him  from  his 
creative  source  by  filling  him  with  the  sentiment  and 
animus  of  independent  or  unrelated  existence.  And 
consequently  before  he  can  come  into  any  genuine 
spiritual  or  aesthetic  sympathy  and  fellowship  with 
the  father,  it  is  necessary  that  his  natural  force  be 
abated  —  that  he  inwardly  die  to  it  in  fact  as  the 
supreme  law  of  his  activity,  and  so  rise  again  to  the 
experience  of  an  inward  and  better  life. 

But  how  shall  we  even  conceive  of  any  such  issue 
coming  about  in  the  case  supposed?  In  the  first 
place  when  a  thing  is  naturally  biased  to  infirmity, 
and  its  nature  is  yet  the  only  force  it  obeys  or  even 
recognizes,  it  seems  impossible  ever  to  expect  it  vol- 
untarily to  contract  a  contrary  bias.  The  trite  lines 
of  the  Roman  poet : 

"  Facilis  descensus  Averni, 
Sed  revocare  gradum,  superasque  evadere  ad  auras. 
Hie  labor,  hoc  opus,  est  "  : 

easily  suggest  the  smooth  and  flowery  path  of  dal- 


EARTH  OF  THE  FINITE  CONSCIOUSNESS.  251 

liance  that  leads  downward,  and  the  sharp  and 
arduous  return  path.  But  I  very  much  doubt 
whether  Virgil  himself,  or  any  other  poet,  Pagan  or 
Christian,  has  ever  faced  the  real  difficulty.  The  real 
difficulty  in  the  way  of  a  man  becoming  good  out  of 
evil,  or  celestial  out  of  infernal,  is  that  good  and  evil, 
heaven  and  hell,  are  not  outgrowths  or  accidents  of  the 
human  personality  by  any  means,  but  necessary  con- 
stituents of  human  nature  itself,  by  which  the  nature 
becomes  freely  developed  to  the  recognition  of  its  sub- 
jects, and  by  whose  active  oppugnancy  and  contrast 
it  becomes  enabled  at  last  in  the  person  of  some 
adequate  subject  gradually  to  slough  off  its  infirm 
mortal  lineaments,  and  ally  itself  with  infinitude. 
Good  and  evil,  heaven  and  hell,  are  not  facts  of  creative, 
but  of  purely  constitutive  order.  They  bear  primarily 
upon  man's  natural  destiny,  and  have  no  relation  to 
his  spiritual  freedom  save  through  that.  They  are  the 
mere  geology  of  our  natural  consciousness,  and  this  is 
all  they  are.  They  have  no  distinctively  supernatural 
quality  nor  efficacy  whatever.  They  have  a  simply 
constitutional  relevancy  to  the  earth  of  man's  asso- 
ciated consciousness,  and  disavow  therefore  any  prop- 
erly creative  or  controlling  relation  to  his  spiritual 
or  individual  freedom.  We  have  been  traditionally 
taught  that  good  and  evil,  heaven  and  hell,  were 
objective   realities,    having    an    absolute    ground   of 


252       HEAVEN  AND  HELL  HAVE  ONLY 

being  in  the  creative  perfection.  But  this  is  the 
baldest,  most  bewildering  nonsense.  They  have  not 
a  grain  of  objective  reality  in  them,  and  are  noway 
vitalized  by  the  absolute  Divine  perfection.  They  are 
purely  subjective  appearances,  vitalized  exclusively 
by  the  created  imperfection,  or  the  uses  they  subserve 
to  our  provisional  moral  and  rational  consciousness. 
When  accordingly  this  consciousness  —  having  more 
than  fulfilled  its  legitimate  office,  and  become  as  it 
now  is  a  mere  stumbling-block  or  rock  of  offence  to 
the  regenerate  mind  of  the  race  —  finally  expires  in 
its  own  stench,  or  else  frankly  allows  itself  to  be 
taken  up  and  disappear  in  our  advancing  social  and 
aesthetic  consciousness,  good  and  evil,  heaven  and  hell, 
will  cease  to  be  appearances  even,  Tor  angel  and 
devil,  saint  and  sinner,  will  then  find  themselves  per- 
fectly fused  or  made  over  in  a  new  or  comprehensive 
race-manhood  which  will  laugh  to  scorn  our  best 
empirical  or  tentative  manhood,  that  is,  our  existing 
civic  and  ecclesiastic  manhood  so-called.  Thus,  as  I 
have  said  somewhere  else,  I  am  fully  persuaded  for 
my  part,  that  no  objective  heaven  will  ever  be  found 
expanding  to  our  foolish  personal  hope,  nor  any  ob- 
jective hell  ever  be  found  responsive  to  our  foolish 
personal  fear.  We  may  be  very  sure  that  our  true 
immortality,  that  which  is  energized  by  the  Divine 
NATURAL  humanity,  is  far  too  human  and  miraculous 


A  SUBJECTIVE   TRUTH.  253 

to  be  mechanized  on  any  such  preposterously  simple 
basis.  No  man,  not  a  simpleton  in  all  spiritual 
regards,  will  ever  acknowledge  a  heaven  of  which  he 
himself  is  not  his  own  sole  St.  Peter,  nor  any  hell  of 
which  he  is  not  his  own  jealous  and  exclusive  turn- 
key. Assuredly  no  heaven  could  exert  the  attractive 
force  of  a  toyshop  to  a  good  man's  imagination,  if  it 
aimed  to  conciliate  his  self-love  and  his  love  of  the 
world  ;  and  no  hell  could  exert  the  binding  force  of  a 
cobweb  to  an  evil  man's  imagination,  if  its  primary 
aim  were  not  to  conciliate  those  exacting  loves. 

But  we  are  digressing.  If  the  evil  of  men  then  did 
not  refer  itself  primarily  to  their  nature,  as  that  nature 
is  determined  by  its  spiritual  Divine  source,  but  were 
an  outward  or  physical  experience  of  the  subject, 
asserting  itself  primarily  through  his  sensations,  there 
could  be  no  manner  of  difficulty  in  the  evil  subject 
winning  himself  back  to  the  upper  air.  Por  man's 
veriest  life  is  a  sensitive  one  at  the  best,  and  if  any 
serious  conflict  accordingly  should  announce  itself  be- 
tween the  life  of  his  senses  and  that  of  his  habitual 
subjective  aspirations,  it  is  safe  to  say  that  he  would 
very  speedily  end  by  renouncing  the  latter. 

But  the  idea  is  simply  stupid.  Evil  is  not  an  out- 
ward thing  save  to  the  inexperienced  mind.  Hell  is 
not  objectively  constituted  save  to  a  juvenile  and 
flimsy  imagination.     It  is  on  .the  contrary  a  purely 


254  SUBJECTIVE  GENESIS 

subjective  life  in  man,  being  the  bloom  of  that  exces- 
sive delight  he  takes  in  his  new-found  natural  self,  and 
its  proper  belongings  :  a  delight  so  naive  and  sincere 
at  first,  and  at  length  so  infatuated  or  magical,  as  to 
be  capable  of  making  evil  seem  unadulterate  good, 
and  falsity  undissembled  truth.  So  that  what  you  vir- 
tually ask  of  an  evil  man  in  expecting  him  to  become 
heavenly,  is  literally  to  turn  himself  outside  in,  or 
dilapidate  himself  as  to  his  existing  carnal  structure, 
and  build  himself  up  anew  in  quite  an  opposite  style 
of  life  or  consciousness  to  that  which  alone  seems  to 
him  either  practicable  or  savory.  In  short,  you  ask 
a  rigid  impossibility  of  him.  Swedenborg  is  emi- 
nently explicit  and  satisfactory  as  to  this  rigidly  natu- 
ral genesis  of  evil  in  man.  He  says  somewhere  —  I 
forget  at  this  moment  exactly  where,  but  I  am  very 
sure  generally  that  it  is  in  his  most  interesting  little 
book  on  the  laws  of  the  Divine  Providence  :  but  I 
beseech  you  not  to  argue  from  this  amiable  scrupu- 
losity of  mine  in  trying  to  supply  you  with  chapter  and 
verse  for  all  my  citations  from  Swedenborg,  that  I 
hold  his  sayings  to  be  of  the  slightest  conceivable 
intellectual  authority,  for  I  do  no  such  stupid  thing ; 
and  indeed  if  I  were  a  priori  inclined  to  any  such 
fatuity,  his  books  would  supply  the  best  possible  cor- 
rective of  the  inclination,  being  the  only  books  I  know 
which  inwardly y  or  of  their  own  proper  substance ^  abjure 


OF  HELL  IN  MAN.  255 


such  an  ungodly  pretension  :  —  that  he  had  been,  for 
demonstrative  purposes  no  doubt,  let  into  the  life  of 
hell  in  man  ;  and  he  found  it  to  be  a  life  of  such  abun- 
dant and  exquisite  delight,  arising  from  the  immense 
love  of  dominion  consequent  upon  the  unrestrained 
love  of  self  in  the  subject,  that  all  the  delights  of  the 
world  seemed  dull  in  comparison  with  it.  He  de- 
scribes it,  I  remember,  as  "  a  delight  of  the  ivJtole  mind 
from  its  centre  to  its  circumference,"  though  it  only 
reported  itself  in  the  body  as  a  certain  triumphant 
swelling  of  the  breast.  And  this  delight  moreover 
would  never  invite  compression,  as  he  says,  if  it  were 
not  for  the  tendency  it  has  to  express  itself  in  unjust 
and  injm'ious  action.  Whenever  accordingly  this  in- 
herent tendency  ultimates  itself  outwardly,  the  evil- 
doer finds  his  inward  freedom,  which  is  the  freedom 
of  willing  and  tliinhing  evil,  suddenly  converted  into 
outward  bondage,  which  is  an  inability  to  do  evil. 
For  hell  is  a  condition  of  life  in  which  men's  outward 
necessities  constrain  them  to  live  together  in  harmony, 
while  they  have  no  inward  bent  to  that  style  of  life. 
The  possibility  of  their  co-existence  in  this  condition 
depends  upon  an  inflexible  law  :  that  no  person  shall 
ever  he  alloiued  to  harm  another  with  impunity.  This 
salutary  law,  which  is  full  of  infinite  Divine  benignity 
towards  them,  each  and  all,  and  which  heavenly- 
minded  people   inwardly    impose    upon    themselves 


256    HELL  IS  ALWAYS   HEAVEN   TO  THE  EVIL   MAN 

every  moment,  is  yet  to  hellish-minded  people  an 
absolute  bondage,  and  constitutes  the  sole  drawback 
or  qualification  to  their  bad  blessedness.  For  what 
can  be  more  absolutely  disgusting  to  one  who  delights 
in  willing  and  thinhing  evil  towards  another,  than  to 
be  constrained  by  the  righteous  fear  of  punishment 
from  ever  doing  him  any  evil  ?  There  can  be  no 
intenser  hell  known  to  a  selfish  man  than  to  have  a 
prudent  regard  for  others  thus  enforced  upon  him. 
But  Swedenborg  always  takes  pains  to  apprize  his 
gentle  reader  that  the  practical  administration  of  this 
law,  which  the  evil  man  finds  it  so  hard,  and  the  good 
man  so  easy,  to  submit  to,  undergoes  all  needful 
mitigation  —  short,  to  be  sure,  of  rendering  its  chas- 
tisements ineffectual  —  through  its  always  taking 
place  under  the  most  watchful  and  tender  angelic 
supervision  or  control.* 

*  The  broad  flood  of  light  which  Swedenborg  throws  upon  the  inti- 
mate Divine  dealings  with  human  nature  throughout  history,  ending 
with  its  final  apotheosis,  or  actual  Divine  glorification,  is  apt  to  leave  liis 
reader  disenchanted  of  any  speculative  interest  he  may  have  felt  in 
regard  to  the  continued  existence  of  hell.  I  think  that  a  man  must 
have  read  Swedenborg  to  little  intellectual  profit,  if  his  mind  is  not 
hopefully  made  up  to  two  things  :  First,  that  the  antagonism  of  heaven 
and  hell  on  moral  grounds,  or  as  a  tradition  of  human  nature,  is  some 
day  sure  to  be  done  away  with  by  the  advance  of  human  society  or  fel- 
lowship :  Second,  that  its  persistence  as  a  spiritual  tradition,  or  condition 
of  individual  experience  and  culture,  may  always  be  counted  upon.     Still 


BUT  WHEN   HE  IS   FORCED   NOT    TO  DO  EVIL.     257 

But  we  are  losing  sight  of  our  hypothetical  illustra- 
tive statue.  The  statue,  then,  in  accordance  with  its 
constitutional  limitations,  and  in  spite  of  its  apparent 
subjective  vivification,  must  remain  utterly  hopeless  of 
regeneration,  or  sesthetic  life ;  that  is,  must  forever 
despair  of  reproducing  in  itself  the  genius  which 
begat  it.  I  say  this  is  in  accordance  with  its  consti- 
tutional limitations  ;  for  its  constitutive  or  mother- 
substance  which  gives  it  body,  can  do  no  more  for  it 
than  give  it  body ;  that  is,  cannot  give  it  soul,  or 
make  it  inwardly  responsive  to  its  creator's  genius. 
And  this  simply  because  the  constitutive  or  mother- 
substance  of  the  statue  was  originally  or  in  itself 
independent  of  the  artist's  genius,  and  beyond  a  cer- 
tain point  therefore  refractory  to  his  will.  This  in 
truth  is  the  inherent  defect  of  all  artistic  creation,  that 
the  artist  is  without  infinitude,  even  his  genius  not 
being  original  with  him,   but   inherited  or  derived 

I  have  thought  it  best  to  tlirow  together  a  few  brief  passages  from  his 
books,  which  may  be  suggestive  of  thought  to  you.  His  books  contain 
no  dogmatic  statement  of  opinion  on  the  subject  of  the  eternity  of  the 
hells  now  so  much  mooted  between  the  sentimentalist  and  traditionalist 
wings  of  the  church ;  and  questions  of  this  magnitude  besides  can 
never  be  settled  for  us  by  any  the  wisest  and  most  erudite  head,  but 
only  by  our  own  wise  and  loving  hearts.  At  all  events  all  Swedenborg's 
utterances  on  the  subject  may  be  looked  at  without  suspicion,  as  they 
liave  no  pretension  to  be  anything  else  than  obiter  dicta,  or  observations 
by-the-way.     See  Appendix  A. 


258  HUMAN   NATURE  THE   SOLE 

from  his  past  ancestry ;  and  hence  he  is  obliged  to  find 
the  material  or  mother-substance  of  his  work  exclu- 
sively within  outward  nature,  and  not,  like  the  Divine 
genius,  within  Himself,  or  the  resources  of  His  own 
infinite  spirit.  Were  the  artist  infinite  like  God  to 
begin  with  —  that  is,  did  he  also  supply  from  his 
own  aesthetic  resources  natural  or  mother-substance 
to  his  creations — then  Ids  creatures,  like  God's,  would 
be  capable  of  assthetic  regeneration  or  spontaneous 
life,  by  virtue  of  his  prior  capacity  to  overcome  for 
them  any  latent  death-tendency  inherent  in  their 
merely  constitutional  substance. 

And  thus  our  supposititious  statue  perfectly  illus- 
trates, in  a  negative  way,  the  positive  truth  I  wish  to 
impress  upon  you,  namely  :  that  the  spiritual  creation 
derives  all  its  power  to  function  from  the  implication 
or  involution  of  the  created  nature.  The  actual  —  or 
ultimate  and  phenomenal  —  sjphere  of  creative  order 
is  the  sole  sphere  of  creative  ^joiver,  in  other  words ; 
and  if  the  power  fail  here,  accordingly,  the  entire 
spiritual  creation  must  instantly  come  to  an  end,  like 
a  tale  that  is  told.  If  the  creative  power  is  unable  to 
reduce  the  creative  nature  to  order,  and  that  more- 
over to  an  order  perfectly  consonant  with  His  own 
infinitude  or  perfection,  the  day  must  soon  come 
when  the  creative  name  itself  will  be  blotted  out 
from  men's  recognition.     But  if  it  is  competent  — 


SPHERE  OF  CREATIVE  POWER.  259 

even  infinitely  competent  to  this  sublime  neces- 
sity, then  we  have  only  to  look  forward  to  the 
fast  approaching  advent  of  the  Divine  kingdom  on 
earth  —  the  earth,  namely,  of  mans  redeemed  natural 
subjectivity ,  mind  you,  and  not  at  all,  save  by  im- 
plication in  that  superior  earth,  the  mere  outside 
objective  earth  of  his  mineral,  vegetable,  and  animal 
existence  —  and  the  consequent  advent  of  a  heaven 
of  spiritual  peace,  felicity,  and  power  in  man,  every 
way  unimaginable  save  upon  the  basis  of  that  re- 
deemed or  Divine-natural  earth. 

But  you  ask  me  not  merely  to  assert  this  com- 
petency of  God  to  our  natural  redemption,  but  to 
state  the  method  of  it.  And  that  statement  will 
require  a  complete  letter  to  itself,  or  perhaps  two. 


LETTER     XX. 


'Y  DEAR  FRIEND:  — Our  almost  soli- 
tary topic  hitherto  has  been  creation. 
And  creation  is  first  of  all  a  rigid  practi- 
cal equation  Between  creator  and  creature, 
or  the  creative  and  created  natures.  No  doubt  creator 
evolves  creature,  as  subject  evolves  object.  But  then 
as  involution  is  always  equal  to  evolution,  being  its 
strict  logical  counterpart  or  correlative,  so  if  creator 
evolve  creature,  or  subject  object,  just  as  truly  on  the 
other  hand  does  creature  involve  creator  or  object  sub- 
ject. But  if  this  were  all  the  truth  upon  the  subject, 
creation  would  be  defeated  by  its  own  genesis.  Eor 
where  involution  and  evolution  are  thus  logically 
equal,  creature  and  creator,  object  and  subject,  prac- 
tically neutralize  each  other,  and  no  logical  exodus 
from  the  difficulty  is  either  possible  or  conceivable. 
That  is,  creator  and  creature  must  confess  themselves 
convertible  terms,  in  order  to  creation  becoming  liv- 
ing: or  conscious.     Created  life  or   consciousness    is 


CREATION  A  FUSION  OF  GOD  AND   MAN.  261 

possible  only  on  one  condition,  which  is :  that  crea- 
tion exhibit  so  complete  a  fusion  between  its  uncon- 
scious and  conscious  factors,  as  practically  to  annul 
their  logical  inequality,  and  so  make  the  resultant  life 
or  consciousness  one.  It  is  impossible  that  God  should 
create  absolute  life  or  being  —  that  is  to  say,  what 
has  life  or  being  in  itself — for  such  life  or  being 
is  ex  vi  termini  uncreated,  would  in  truth  be  God 
himself.  He  can  only  create  therefore  what  has  not 
life  or  being  in  itself,  what  consequently  is  merely 
relative  or  associated  life  or  being,  and  consists  in 
loving  others  :  and  He  creates  this  only  by  the  free 
or  infinite  communication  to  the  creature  of  His  own 
life  or  being,  that  is,  of  Himself.  It  is  this  infinite 
communication  which  alone  makes  created  life  or 
consciousness  conceivable.  For  how  shall  that  which 
by  the  hypothesis  of  its  creatureship  is  void  of  life  or 
consciousness  in  its  own  right,  ever  attain  to  actual 
fife  or  consciousness,  but  by  the  free  unstinted  com- 
munication of  its  creator's  life  to  it  as  henceforth  its 
own  life  ? 

We,  nevertheless,  misled  by  sense,  have  had  the 
fatuity  to  conceive  that  creator  and  creature  are 
essentially  inconvertible  terms,  sternly  repudiating 
each  the  other's  practical  identification  with  itself. 
We  are  in  the  habit  of  postulating  such  an  essential 
oppugnancy   between  them,    as  necessarily  converts 


262  IT  INCLUDES  CREATOR 

human  life  into  a  sign  or  witness  of  their  inveterate 
duahty,  and  so  fills  the  universe  of  consciousness  with 
pride,  blasphemy,  and  despair.  How  necessarily  we 
make  creation  appear  the  limping,  one-horse-concern 
it  does  appear,  in  thus  making  it  include  the  creature 
but  exclude  the  creator,  or  include  matter  and  ex- 
clude mind  or  spirit !  As  if  the  creature  could  ever 
be  given  without  the  logical  implication  of  creator  to 
constitute  him  !  Or  the  creator  ever  be  given  with- 
out the  logical  explication  of  creature  to  reveal  Him  ! 
What  wonder  is  it,  under  these  circumstances,  that 
our  men  of  science  should  tend  so  generally  to  iden- 
tify God's  glory  primarily  with  sun,  moon  and  stars, 
and  only  secondarily  or  derivatively  with  man  ?  Our 
traditional  creeds  to  be  sure  still  echo  the  ancient 
faith  of  mankind,  that  matter  and  mind,  nature  and 
spirit,  are  inextricably  married  or  interfused  ;  but  this 
faith  has  so  little  vitality  left,  or  has  become  so  com- 
pletely fossilized  by  the  worldliness  of  the  Church, 
that  very  many  of  our  leading  scientific  men  spring 
eagerly  to  the  conviction,  which  some  of  them  do  not 
hesitate  to  avow,  that  the  material  universe  exists  ab- 
solutely, or  for  its  own  sake  exclusively,  and  betrays 
no  record  whatever  of  a  creator. 

Such  is  the  intellectual  disability  which  our  igno- 
rance and  imbecility  in  regard  to  the  spiritual  truth  of 
creation  inevitably  impose  upon  us ;  and  so  long  as 


AND  CREATURE  QUITE  EQUALLY.  263 

we  remain  contentedly  disabled  we  must  forego  our 
intellectual  manhood,  and  lie  supine  and  inert  in 
spiritual  infancy.  Tor  manifestly  so  long  as  I  am 
content  to  look  upon  creation,  not  as  the  living  fusion, 
but  as  the  living  divorce  of  the  two  natures,  creator 
and  creature,  I  must  necessarily  think  the  divine 
nature  to  be  essentially  alien  or  antagonistic  to  my 
own.  That  is  to  say,  I  can  never  think  of  God  as  a 
being  of  an  essentially  human  quality.  And  if  I  can- 
not think  of  God  in  this  light,  if  I  do  not  think  of 
him  as  essential  man,  I  had  better  not  think  of  him  at 
all,  since  I  cannot  think  of  him  to  any  good  but  only 
to  an  evil  purpose.  For  if  God  is  my  creator,  and  yet 
claims  a  nature  essentially  alien  and  antagonistic  to 
my  own,  I  never  can  really  love  him,  because  I  can 
never  really  know  him,  inasmuch  as  I  cannot  know 
what  my  nature  does  not  qualify  me  to  know.  In 
fact  I  can  only  hate  him,  however  much  my  prudence 
may  lead  me  to  dissimulate  my  hate  ;  for  no  rational 
being  can  feel  himself  at  the  mercy  of  a  power  infi- 
nitely superior  to  himself,  and  at  the  same  time  utterly 
alien  and  antagonistic  to  himself,  without  a  righteous 
hatred  to  such  power.  So  that  if  every  man  is  — 
spiritually  or  intellectually  —  only  what  his  idea  of 
God  makes  him,  I  may  freely  say  that  my  idea  of  God 
as  being  of  a  nature  essentially  foreign  and  repugnant 
to  my  own,  makes  all  my  worship  of  him  supersti- 


264  DEISM  AS  A   PHILOSOPHY 

tious  or  depraved,  and  hence  fixes  me  in  intellectual 
night.  So  long  as  I  admit  an  essential  contrariety  be- 
tween the  two  natures,  which  I  needs  must  do  when  I 
in  thought  identify  the  creative  activity  primarily  with 
the  geometry  of  the  physical  universe,  and  refuse  to 
identify  it,  save  in  a  very  secondary  and  derivative  or 
indirect  way,  with  the  laws  of  the  human  mind,  I 
never  can  rationally  acknowledge  the  Divine  exist- 
ence, nor  consequently  ever  honestly  worship  it.  For 
human  nature  claims  so  divine  a  quality  to  my  im- 
agination—  seems  to  be  so  infinitely  worthy  of  my 
devout  love  and  worship  —  that  I  cannot  spontane- 
ously recognize  any  divinity  outside  of  it.  And  if  I 
yet  pretend  to  recognize  such  a  divinity,  and  offer 
Him  my  servile  or  interested  homage,  what  am  I 
but  a  degraded  being,  sunk  in  spiritual  penury,  or 
intellectual  savagery?  I  may  indeed  be  all  uncon- 
scious of  my  degradation,  because  such  multitudes 
partake  it  in  common  with  me ;  but  there  it  unmis- 
takably is,  all  the  while,  nevertheless. 

In  short,  deism  as  a  philosophic  doctrine,  that  is,  as 
importing  an  essential  difference  between  the  divine 
and  human  natures,  or  God  and  man,  is  a  philosophic 
absurdity.  There  is  no  God  but  the  Lord,  or  our 
glorified  natural  humanity,  and  whatsoever  other 
deity  w^e  worship,  is  but  a  baleful  idol  of  our  own 
spiritual  fantasy,  whom  we  superstitiously  project  into 


IS  A  GROSS   ABSURDITY.  265 

nature  to  scourge  us  into  quasi  or  provisional  man- 
hood, while  as  yet  Ave  are  blind  to  the  spiritual  truth. 
We  ourselves  reflect  upon  the  universe  the  divinity 
which  dwells  latent,  and  unrecognized  —  if  not  cruci- 
fied, in  our  souls  ;  and  we  see  only  what  we  ourselves 
give.  The  untaught  rustic  may  look  forever  at  the 
shapeless  block  of  marble,  without  receiving  a  hint 
from  it  of  its  essential  subserviency  to  the  uses  of  Art. 
So  we  might  forever  contemplate  the  material  world, 
without  its  ever  giving  us  so  much  as  a  suggestion  of 
deity,  unless  our  imvard  instinct  of  his  omnipresence 
compelled  the  suggestion.  The  animal  sees  the  same 
things  we  see.  AVhy  does  not  he  also  suspect  a  latent 
divinity  ?  Simply  because  he,  unlike  us,  is  destitute 
of  an  inward  divine  genius  or  nature,  and  hence  has 
no  power  to  shed  an  outward  shadow  of  divinity  upon 
things  below  him.  No.  God  is  a  denizen  first  of 
the  microcosm,  and  only  by  reflection  thence  of  the 
macrocosm.  That  is  to  say,  he  spiritually  inhabits 
the  human  mind  alone,  and  what  we  discern  of  him 
in  the  mechanism  of  nature,  or  the  laws  of  the  uni- 
verse, is  but  a  faint  image  or  reverberation  of  the 
living  death,  or  spiritual  infamy,  to  which  we  con- 
sign Him  in  our  own  souls,  while  as  yet  we  are  obdu- 
rate to  the  solicitations  of  His  essential  humanity. 

Now  it  strikes  me  that  what  I  have  just  been  say- 
ing is  very  true  in  its  place,  but  that  this  is  not  its 


266  CREATION   CONSISTS  SPIRITUALLY 

place ;  at  all  events  it  is  not  exactly  what  I  set  out 
to  say.  What  I  intended  at  starting  to  show  you 
was  that  creation,  being  this  undeniable  spiritual  or 
infinite  equation  of  the  Divine  and  human  natures 
which  I  have  described  it  to  be,  would  be  a  very 
shallow  form  of  blessing  to  bestow  upon  the  creature. 
If  the  entire  creative  bounty  consisted  in  giving  the 
creature  existence,  if  it  involved  no  deeper,  subtler 
Divine  mercy  than  this,  creation  would  turn  out  a 
signal  curse  to  man,  for  it  would  leave  the  Divine 
being  a  mere  prey  to  man's  devouring  and  destroying 
appetites  and  passions.  By  creation  alone  —  that  is 
to  say,  creation  left  undivinized  by  the  creature's 
subsequent  natural  redemption  —  man  is  made  sim- 
ply self-conscious,  and  endoAved  moreover  with  self- 
hood of  a  marvellously  infirm  and  even  infra-bestial 
character.  For  in  that  case  God's  creature,  unlike 
the  beasts,  would  have  no  instinct  to  moderate  and 
mitigate  his  natural  ferocity,  but  would  be  an  un- 
qualified form  of  raven  and  slaughter.  Accordingly 
I  repeat,  that  if  creation  resulted  only  in  giving 
man  conscious  existence,  or  phenomenal  selfhood,  it 
would  be  a  boon  altogether  unworthy  of  the  creator 
to  bestow. 

Creation,  however,  is  not  of  this  futile  pattern.  It 
does  not  consist,  either  wholly  or  in  part,  in  giving 
the  creature  self-consciousness,  or  investing  him  with 


IN  DIVINIZING  THE  CREATED  NATURE;  267 

phenomenal  personality.  It  merely  assumes  these 
things  in  the  creature,  or  takes  them  for  granted,  as 
the  outcome  and  expression  of  his  essential  spiritual 
imbecility  and  nothingness.  And  then  it  forthwith 
proceeds  to  make  this  negative  base  or  spiritual 
unconsciousness  of  the  creature  the  surest  possible 
guarantee  of  his  subsequent  spiritual  conjunction  and 
fellowship  with  God.  We  may  say  then  that  crea- 
tion, viewed  as  a  spiritual  or  infinite  Divine  process, 
necessarily  involves  to  the  created  intelligence  two 
stages,  first :  a  descending  or  centrifugal  one,  in 
which  the  creator  becomes  thoroughly  identified  with 
the  nature  of  the  creature,  in  becoming  thoroughly 
alienated  from  his  finite  personality ;  and,  secondly  : 
an  ascending  or  centripetal  stage,  in  which  the  crea- 
ture becomes  exalted  in  his  turn  to  immortal  spirit- 
ual conjunction  with  God,  in  renouncing  the  interests 
of  his  proper  person  whenever  they  conflict  with  those 
of  his  common  nature. 

How  is  this  natural  redemption  of  the  creature 
practically  brought  about  ?  We  shall  be  best  able 
to  answer  this  question  by  keeping  clearly  in  mind 
what  we  have  seen  to  be  the  precise  form  of  evil  in 
the  creature  to  which  his  finite  genesis,  or  his  very 
nature  as  a  creature,  exposes  him,  and  from  which  it 
is  the  true  glory  of  God  to  deliver  him. 

The  evil  then  to  which,  as  we  have  seen,  man  is 


268  AND  so  REDEEMING   IT  FROM 

naturally  prone,  and  indeed  doomed  by  his  finite  gen- 
eration, is  personal  consciousness,  or  the  feeling  of  life 
in  himself  as  his  own  life  absolutely,  or  without  re- 
spect to  other  men.  There  is  no  evil  at  all  comparable 
with  this  either  for  comprehensiveness  or  intensity, 
if  it  be  allowed  to  go  uncorrected ;  for  it  is  altogether 
fatal  to  man's  spiritual  life,  which  consists  in  his 
loving  his  neighbor  as  himself.  Now  the  only  possi- 
ble way  for  a  man  to  do  this  is  to  feel  that  he  is  not 
self-centred,  that  his  life  is  7iot  his  own  personally, 
but  belongs  to  him  in  strict  community  with  his 
neighbor;  thus  that  he  and  his  neighbor  are  both 
alike  dependent  at  every  moment  for  every  breath  of 
life  they  draw  upon  one  and  the  same  merciful  and 
impartial  source.  In  other  words  a  man  loves  his 
neighbor  as  himself  only  by  virtue  of  his  first  loving 
God  above  himself,  or  supremely.  And  the  only  way 
this  supreme  love  becomes  developed  or  educated  in 
him,  is  through  his  moral  experience,  or  his  obedience 
to  law.  Whenever,  and  so  long  as,  man  is  tempted 
to  commit  false  or  mahcious  speaking,  theft,  adultery, 
murder,  or  covetousness,  and  yet  abstains  from  doing 
it  out  of  a  sincere  inward  regard  for  the  Divine  name, 
his  self-love,  so  far  as  it  is  harmful,  is  spiritually 
slain,  and  the  Divine  love  infallibly  replaces  it.  These 
formal  vices  express  the  whole  substantial  evil  known 
to  the  human  heart,  and  when  man,  therefore,  in  the 


THE  POWER  AND  TAINT  OF   EVIL.  269 

exercise  of  a  felt  freedom  and  rationality  deposes  them 
or  any  of  them  from  their  habitual  control  over  his 
action,  not  because  they  conflict  with  his  outward 
welfare,  or  expose  him  to  the  contempt  of  men,  but 
simply  because  they  wound  his  inward  reverence  for 
the  Divine  name,  he  becomes  spiritually  regenerate  or 
new-born.  Falsehood,  theft,  adultery,  murder,  and 
covetousness  are,  in  other  words,  only  signs  or  sym- 
bols of  a  deeper  and  altogether  latent  spiritual  evil 
fatally  separating  man  from  God :  the  evil  of  a  su- 
preme self-love.  Grave  as  these  evils  unquestionably 
are  in  themselves,  or  absolutely,  they  have  yet  only 
a  superficial  moral  quality,  that  is,  grow  out  of  men's 
still  unreconciled  or  inharmonic  relations  inter  se,  or 
their  frank  insubjection  to  the  social  sentiment,  and 
do  not  by  any  means  necessarily  imply  any  perma- 
nent spiritual  or  individual  estrangement  between 
them  and  God. 

But  the  evil  consciousness  which  they  typify  in 
men  is  man's  only  true  and  spiritual  evil.  The  con- 
sciousness of  a  finite  existence  or  selfhood,  given  out- 
right to  every  man  in  strict  independence  of  every  other 
man:  this  is  essential  death  and  hell  to  the  human 
bosom,  and  spiritually  litters  all  its  abounding  moral 
corruption.  Why  ?  Because  it  practically  gives  the 
lie  to  men's  spiritual  creatureship,  or  affirms  that 
they  have  no  natural  form  and  order  corresponding  to 


270  THE  EVIL  OF   HUMAN    NATURE 

their  inward  or  spiritual  unity  in  God.  Accordingly 
if  man's  mind  had  never  been  fatally  drugged  by  this 
stupid  conceit  of  his  rightful  independence  of  his 
neighbor  in  the  Divine  sight,  he  would  never  have 
been  so  suicidal  as  to  dream  of  coveting  the  goods,  or 
wounding  the  honor,  or  compassing  the  life  of  his 
neighbor.  On  the  contrary  he  would  have  been  exqui- 
sitely sure  to  defend  his  neighbor's  interests  as  if  they 
were  his  own.  Thus  it  is  man's  very  nature  as  a  crea- 
ture to  absorb  or  appropriate  the  Divine  life  or  being 
to  his  own  paltry  and  fantastic  little  self;  and  the  Di- 
vine name  consequently  would  soon  have  lapsed  from 
human  regard  even  as  a  tradition,  were  the  creature 
not  all  the  while  providentially  prompted  to  conceal 
his  flagrant  misappropriation  of  the  Divine  substance 
from  his  own  eyes,  by  assiduously  exj)rc2)riatin(/  the 
mere  name  of  God  to  any  worthless  or  imaginary 
supernatural  candidate  who  may  apply  for  the  distinc- 
tion :  so  relegating  his  creator  to  an  entirely  objective 
or  outward  relation  to  himself. 

Subjective  or  personal  consciousness,  then  :  the  feel- 
ing we  all  of  us  have  that  our  natural  selfhood  is  our 
own  absolutely,  and  without  reference  to  any  grander 
natural  objectivity,  such  for  example  as  society  :  is 
the  brimming  spiritual  death  wrapped  up  in  every 
man  by  virtue  of  his  finite  generation.  And  now  we 
shall  be  able  to  see  with  all  possible  clearness  with 


IS  SUBJECTIVE  CONSCIOUSNESS.  271 

what  a  miglity  hand  the  Divine  providence  delivers 
us  from  this  infernal  blight  incident  to  our  nature. 

The  inevitable  vice  of  man's  natural  subjectivity,  or 
finite  selfhood,  is,  that  it  exteriorates  object  to  subject, 
or  places  a  man's  proper  life  outside  and  below  the  man 
himself.  This  is  hopelessly  contrary  to  the  spiritual 
order  of  human  life,  which  interior ates  object  to  sub- 
ject, and  places  a  man's  proper  life  within  or  above  the 
man  himself.  In  other  words,  the  fundamental  infirm- 
ity of  human  nature  is  that  it  subjects  man  primarily 
to  the  control  of  sense,  and  allows  him  only  so  much 
soul,  or  spirituality,  as  consists  with  that  primary 
requisite.  In  confirmation  of  this,  we  may  point  to 
the  notorious  fact,  that  the  method  of  man's  spiritual 
or  private  regeneration  has  always  been  defined  by 
the  professing  church  as  standing  in  no  frivolous 
moral  change  or  improvement  wrought  in  the  subject, 
but  only  in  a  change  of  heart :  that  is,  such  a  com- 
plete reversal  of  the  law  of  his  nature  as  makes  him 
act  henceforth  from  the  impulsion  of  an  inward  mo- 
tive or  object,  instead  of  an  outward  one.  It  is  well 
known,  moreover,  that  the  church  has  always  looked 
upon  this  reversal  of  tlie  law  of  his  nature  as  prac- 
tically energized  by  the  subject  in  ward!  1/  constraining 
himself,  through  a  most  living  reverence  for  the  Divine 
name,  to  deny  his  senses  whenever  they  prompt  him 
to  selfish  or  unmanly  action. 


272  MAN'S  MORAL  EVILS  ARE  NOT 

Do  not  mistake  ray  present  purpose,  however,  in 
this  reference.  We  are  not  now  talking  of  a  man's 
spiritual  or  private  regeneration,  which  is  his  individ- 
ual deliverance  from  the  law  of  his  nature,  but  of  a 
much  grander  problem.  We  are  talking  in  this  place 
of  our  poor  and  abject  human  nature  itself,  and  of  the 
peculiar  freeing  or  infiniting  it  gets  at  the  Divine 
hands  from  the  bondage  imposed  upon  it  by  our 
wretched  personalities,  both  good  and  evil.  For 
human  nature  itself  is  condemned  in  its  turn  to  inev- 
itable and  hopeless  limitation  or  finiteness  by  all  its 
personal  subjects,  whether  these  be  relatively  to  each 
other  celestial  or  infernal ;  and  is  bound  therefore  by 
the  Divine  righteousness  to  undergo  in  its  turn  also  a 
plenary  redemption.  And  the  question  of  immediate 
interest  to  us  is,  to  ascertain  the  method  of  this  tran- 
scendent Divine  deliverance.  This  is  the  problem  I 
am  about  trying  to  solve  to  your  understanding.  If 
I  only  approximately  solve  it,  I  shall  nevertheless 
deem  myself  entitled  to  claim  your  patient  attention 
while  doing  thus  much.  But  if  I  succeed  in  perfectly 
solving  it,  as  I  hope  to  be  able  to  do  —  and  that  too 
without  claiming  to  myself  any  exceptional  ability  — 
I  trust  that  you  then,  like  me,  will  honestly  give 
the  sole  praise  of  my  performance  to  the  boundless 
intellectual  inspiration  and  illumination  of  the  Chris- 
tian truth. 


THE  TRUE  EVIL  OF  HIS  NATURE.  273 

The  characteristic  natural  evil  of  man  is  subjective 
consciousness.  Naturally  ignorant  that  his  life  or  be- 
ing inheres  exclusively  in  God  his  creator  (though  he 
is  no  way  backward  to  admit  that  it  originally  came 
from  Him),  he  unhesitatingly  appropriates  it  to  him- 
self, feeling  himself  to  be  good  when  its  issues  are 
orderly,  and  evil  when  its  issues  are  disorderly.  This 
I  say  is  the  natural  and  therefore  the  deepest  evil 
known  to  the  human  race.  Man  no  doubt  attributes 
to  himself  personally  many  much  lesser  evils  than 
this,  such  as  murder,  adultery,  false  witness,  theft,  and 
covetousness,  and  thinks  if  he  were  once  well  rid  of 
these  outward  evils,  he  would  be  inwardly  or  spirit- 
ually quit  of  evil  altogether;  neither  knowing  nor 
dreaming  that  his  moral  maladies  are  only  so  many 
visible  symptoms  of  a  far  deeper  invisible  disease  in 
his  nature  to  the  cure  of  which  God  alone  is  ade- 
quate. These  moral  evils,  however  grievous  they 
may  justly  seem  in  a  scientific  or  police  estimate  of 
human  life,  are  of  absolutely  no  consequence  in  a 
philosophic  estimate,  save  as  revealing  that  profound 
and  otherwise  undiscoverable  spiritual  evil  in  man  to 
which  alone  they  owe  every  fibre  of  their  unhand- 
some existence.  This  latter  evil  is  the  only  deadly 
evil  known  to  the  heart,  because  it  is  the  only  one 
which  directly  impugns  the  Divine  sovereignty  over 
His  creatures ;  and  in  giving  man  deliverance  from  its 


274  THAT   CONSISTS   IN   EXTERIORATING 


dominion  accordingly,  the  Divine  love  restores  him 
ipso  facto  to  moral  purity. 

Now  the  immediate  effect,  as  I  have  before  said,  of 
this  fallacious  subjective  consciousness  in  man,  or 
of  his  inwardly  appropriating  the  Divine  substance 
to  himself,  is  to  put  the  creator  bodily  outside  of 
His  creation  to  the  imagination  of  His  creature :  to 
compel  Him  to  occupy  at  best  a  merely  magisterial  or 
legal  and  critical  relation  to  His  creature  ;  in  short :  to 
relegate  the  father  of  our  spirits  to  a  purely  external 
and  objective  intercourse  with  us.  By  this  misappro- 
priation of  the  creative  life  or  being  to  himself,  the 
creature  becomes  the  only  subjective  consciousness, 
the  only  conscious  form  of  selfhood,  known  to  the 
universe,  and  by  an  unerring  instinct  of  that  limitary 
form  after  thus  appropriating  to  himself  the  Divine 
substance,  he  instantly  hastens  —  as  if  to  hide  that 
ugly  transaction  from  his  own  eyes  —  to  expropriate, 
as  I  have  before  said,  the  robbed  and  rifled  Divine 
Tiame  away  from  himself,  in  relegating  it  to  the 
use  of  any  imaginary  supernatural  pretender  who 
seems  worthy  of  it,  and  evinces  such  worth  by  con- 
senting to  stand  in  a  purely  sensible  or  outward  and 
objective  relation  to  him :  that  is,  consenting  to  treat 
him  as  an  absolutely  free  and  rational  subject,  right- 
fully praiseworthy  and  blameworthy  on  the  ground  of 
his  own  independent  merits  alone:  that  is,  as  a  dis- 


THE  CREATOR  TO  THE  CREATURE.       275 

tinctly  private  and  sacred  person  utterly  ignoring  and 
disallowing  a  social,  public,  or  race-consciousness. 

Of  course  this  little  provisional  drama  that  I  have 
just  been  describing,  enacts  itself  within,  and  confines 
itself  to,  the  limits  of  the  creature's  consciousness,  and 
those  limits  exclmively ,  and  does  not  even  project  a 
passing  shadow  of  itself  upon  the  field  of  his  true 
and  intimate  yet  most  unconscious  relations  to  God. 
But  within  these  limits  the  most  High  does  tenderly 
condescend  to  the  part  assigned  Him  by  his  auda- 
cious creature,  and  unfalteringly  play  it  out  more- 
over to  its  last  gasp  of  humiliation.  For  only  by  the 
creator  consenting  to  incarnate  himself  in  flesh  and 
blood,  and  play  the  part  of  real  object  to  the  crea- 
ture's fallacious  subjectivity,  does  the  drama  of  human 
nature  and  history  convert  itself  out  of  a  stupid  and 
meaningless  farce,  into  a  grand,  sublime,  and  tragic 
revelation  of  the  infinite  and  eternal  perfection.  Do 
you  ask  me.  How?  I  will  gladly  proceed  to  tell 
you,  for  this  at  length  is  the  whole  point  of  my  pro- 
tracted epistolary  mission  to  you. 

—  But  in  order  to  do  so  fairly  and  squarely,  I  shall 
be  obliged  to  make  an  addition  to  the  sum  of  these 
specifically  intercalary  letters. 


LETTER    XXI. 


'Y  DEAR  FRIEND  :  — We  have  seen  that 
the  creator,  because  He  gives  being  to  the 
creature,  must  always  remain  the  latter's 
sole  and  total  vital  substance.  How,  in 
this  state  of  things,  shall  the  creature  ever  attain  to 
selfhood,  or  come  to  feel  himself  an  alien  being  to 
God? 

Only  in  a  way  we  may  be  sure  of  the  strictest  illu- 
sion, or  in  consequence  of  a  gross  deception  imposed 
on  him  by  his  senses. 

In  the  first  place  the  creature  is  necessarily  igno- 
rant of  the  truth  of  a  spiritual  creation,  and  utterly 
blind  therefore  to  the  intellectual  significance  of  Na- 
ture as  aflfording  it  a  necessary  basis  of  evolution.  If 
he  has  ever  at  all  entertained  the  idea  of  creation  as 
an  attribute  of  the  Divine  perfection,  he  regards  it 
at  most  as  an  explanation  of  existing  things,  or  as 
accounting  for  the  production  of  Nature,  which  he 
hence  conceives  as  a  work  of  God  taking  place  in 


ILLUSOKY  GENESIS  OF  SELFHOOD.  277 

some  pre-existing  space  and  time,  and  finished  at  one 
or  more  successive  coups-de-main  of  the  Divine  archi- 
tect as  his  sacred  traditions  report.  Thus  nature, 
instead  of  being  to  his  intellect  the  fertile  evidence 
and  argument  of  God's  eternal  spiritual  activity,  is 
the  practical  denial  and  stoppage  of  it  when  it  once 
existed,  interposing  so  far  as  the  creature's  faculties 
are  concerned  a  dense  "w^all  of  partition  between  him 
and  God,  instead  of  a  transparent  medium  of  com- 
munication. 

In  the  second  place :  being  thus  ignorant  of  the 
truth  of  a  spiritual  creation,  and  of  nature's  purely 
educative  uses  in  subordination  thereto,  he  is  an 
every  way  apt  pupil  of  his  senses  which  stand  ready 
to  impose  npon  his  nascent  intelligence  two  immeas- 
urable and  wellnigh  inveterate  fallacies.  The  first  of 
which  is :  That  Nature,  or  the  great  realm  of  uncon- 
scious life  to  which  our  senses  give  us  our  earliest 
introduction  or  initiation,  exists  only  to  sense,  being 
finitely  or  materially  constituted.  And  the  second 
follows  from  this :  In  that  Nature  being  thus  finitely 
or  materially  constituted,  every  natural  thing  must  be 
created  in  sheer  independence  of  every  other  natural 
thing,  and  exist  therefore  on  its  own  substantial  basis, 
being  its  own  absolute  self,  without  obligation  to,  or 
necessary  connection  with,  any  other  coexisting  thing. 

In  this  way  then,  or  by  the  mere  and  sheer  docility 


278     EFFECT  OF  THE  ILLUSION  IN  NECESSITATING 

of  his  intellect  to  his  senses,  the  creature  not  only 
attains  to  the  illusion  of  selfhood,  or  the  feeling  of  life 
in  himself  absolutelj^  and  irrespectively  of  all  other 
men,  but  he  also  manages  to  maintain  himself  in  that 
illusion,  through  every  casualty  and  calamity  to  which 
an  earthly  lot  engineered  upon  so  shallow  and  treach- 
erous a  basis,  necessarily  exposes  him.  And  having 
these  sensuous  ideas  of  creation  to  begin  v>'ith,  the 
creature  instinctively  and  unwittingly  honors  the  Di- 
vine name  in  making  it  henceforth  sensibly  external 
and  objective  to  the  sphere  of  his  own  fallacious  and 
fraudulent  subjectivity. 

What  is  the  effect  on  the  creator  of  this  stupidity 
on  the  part  of  the  creature?  Does  He  consent  to 
abandon  —  as  the  creature  would  gladly  have  Him 
do  —  His  essential  spiritual  primacy  in  all  the  realm 
of  the  created  consciousness  ?  Does  He  consent  to 
forego,  at  His  creature's  bidding,  His  indefeasible 
spiritual  supremacy  over  the  creature? 

Bv  no  means.  On  the  contrary.  He  enhances  His 
spiritual  hold  upon  the  creature  indefinitely,  by  frankly 
acquiescing  in  the  banishment  which  the  latter  assid- 
uously imposes  on  Him,  and  obediently  masking  or 
concealing  Himself  henceforth  in  the  lineaments  of 
the  created  7iafure.  For  the  creature  as  finite  or  con- 
scious subject  can  have  no  proper  object  but  his 
unconscious  nature.     And  if  the  creator  consents  to 


A  DIVINE-NATURAL  ORDER  OF  LIFE.  279 

identify  Himself  with  this  object,  sinking  all  His 
spiritual  activity  in  the  endeavor  to  develop  it,  His 
spiritual  hold  upon  the  creature  will  only  be  indefi- 
nitely promoted  in  place  of  being  abated. 

Let  me  make  this  point  very  clear  to  your  under- 
standing, and  thus  do  you  the  greatest  philosophic 
service  which  one  man  may  do  another.  In  fact  we 
are  now  arrived  at  the  actual  turning-point  of  dark 
to  bright  in  the  entire  field  of  philosophic  truth,  and 
no  cloud,  if  it  be  not  a  very  passing  one,  will  be  able 
henceforward  to  obscure  our  good  understanding. 

What  I  have  said,  then,  I  now  repeat :  1.  That  the 
creator  in  submitting  to  the  misappropriation  of  His 
creative  being  or  substance  by  the  creature  to  his  own 
shallow  self,  is  necessarily  —  in  condescension  to  His 
creature's  infirm  understanding  —  forced  out  of  an 
exclusively  spiritual  or  subjective  relation  to  the  crea- 
ture, and  obliged  to  occupy  a  purely  natural  or  objec- 
tive and  personal  relation  to  him  :  and  2.  That  this 
purely  adventitious  or  limitary  manhood  into  which 
the  creator  finds  Himself  constrained  by  zeal  for  the 
creature's  welfare,  constitutes  His  own  eternal  spirit- 
ual glory,  inasmuch  as  it  affords  Him  his  only  oppor- 
tunity to  come  in  contact  with  the  sphere  of  evil  in 
the  creature  (that  is,  the  sphere  of  selfhood),  and 
hence  endows  Him  with  all  His  ability  to  deliver 
the  latter  from  its  mortal  coil  and  defilement. 


280         THIS  ORDER  ALONE  RELEASES   MAN   FROM 

And  now  before  proceeding  to  give  you  the  rationale 
of  this  transcendent  deliverance,  allow  me  first  to  state 
precisely  what  is  meant  by  the  created  nature,  in  con- 
tradistinction to  the  persons  of  that  nature. 

By  the  abstract  nature  of  a  thing,  then,  we  mean 
the  relation  of  community  existing  between  that  thing 
and  all  other  things  embraced  in  its  nature,  in  spite 
of  their  specific  differences.  So  by  the  created  nature 
I  mean  the  relations  of  community  —  that  is,  of  com- 
mon unity  —  necessarily  existing  between  each  and 
all  creatures.  Every  creature  claims  to  be  in  himself 
absolutely  other  than,  or  alien  to,  every  other  creature. 
Consequently,  the  nature  of  the  creature  imports,  that 
in  spite  of  these  alleged  personal,  subjective,  or  abso- 
lute differences  on  the  part  of  the  creature,  they  have 
all  a  common  unity :  and  is  in  fact  itself  the  expres- 
sion and  affirmation  of  such  unity.  Now,  obviously, 
as  all  creatures  claim  to  be  in  themselves,  or  subjec- 
tively, alien  to  every  other,  hence  without  personal 
unity  with  each  other,  this  reciprocal  natural  unity 
which  they  exhibit  cannot  possibly  inhere  in  them- 
selves, and  so  avouch  itself  a  subjective  or  substantial 
unity,  but  must  refer  itself  altogether  to  some  foreign 
source,  and  so  confess  itself  at  best  a  purely  formal 
or  objective  unity.  Let  us  always  remember  therefore 
that  the  nature  of  the  creature  is  obligatory  upon  him, 
and  supremely  obligatory.     It  does  not  express  him. 


THE  EVILS   INCIDENT  TO  HIS  SELFHOOD.         281 

but  he  expresses  it.  It  does  not  derive  from  him,  but 
he  derives  from  it.  He  says  for  himself :  "individual- 
ity or  difference  a  oufrance"  It  says  :  "  individuality 
or  difference,  to  your  heart's  content  indeed,  as  a  final- 
ity ;  but  only  in  virtue  of  a  previous  natural  commun- 
ity or  identity  keeping  it  eternally  fresh  and  sweet." 
In  short  he  is  subject  to  his  nature,  and  his  nature  is 
object  or  law  to  him.  One  cannot  be  subject  to  any- 
thing, without  the  thing  being  his  master,  without  its 
turning  out  his  sole  object  or  supreme  law ;  nor  conse- 
quently without  his  turning  out  its  involuntary  ser- 
vant ;  that  is,  its  slave.  Por  in  all  natural  or  related 
existence  it  is  the  object  which  determines  and  con- 
trols the  subject,  and  not,  as  the  idealists  foolishly 
hold,  the  subject  which  gives  law  to  the  object.  It 
is  indeed  the  object  which  altogether  constitutes  the 
subject,  which  makes  it  self-conscious,  or  seem  to 
itself  to  be ;  and  never  the  latter  which  does  this  for 
the  former :  for  the  natural  object  is  always  uncon- 
scious, or  undefined  and  without  selfliood,  towards 
the  natural  subject.  To  say  in  one  word  all  that 
need  be  said :  it  is  the  object  which  alone  is  mother- 
suhstance  to  the  subject,  or  endows  it  with  appreciable 
body :  so  guaranteeing  to  it  a  fixed  or  constant  natu- 
ral identity,  whatever  surprising  enlargements  may 
subsequently  befall  its  spiritual  individuality. 

It  is  plain  now,  I  think,  both  what  we  mean  when 


282  SUPERIOEITY  OF  LIVING   KNOWLEDGE 

we  speak  of  the  created  nature,  and  what  wc  mean 
when  we  speak  of  the  created  personahty.  By  the 
former  we  express  that  thing  which  alone  gives  spir- 
itual reality  or  objectivity  to  the  creature,  in  giving 
him  constitutional  or  unconscious  substance ;  and  we 
express  by  the  latter  that  thing  which  alone  stamps 
the  creature  with  spiritual  unreality  or  phenomenality, 
in  giving  him,  not  constitutional  or  unconscious  sub- 
stance, but  only  conscious  personal  form.  I  say,  to 
be  sure,  that  thus  much  is  plain,  and  I  would  will- 
ingly believe  it  to  be  so.  But  I  confess  I  should 
like  to  make  it  much  plainer  by  some  fitting  illus- 
tration derived  from  our  natural  experience ;  which, 
in  showing  how  invariably  and  absolutely  primary 
the  real  or  objective  element  in  consciousness  is  to  the 
phenomenal  or  subjective  element,  may  also  throw 
some  illustrative  light  upon  the  great  truth  of  the 
spiritual  creation  :  the  Divine  Incarnation. 

Take,  for  example,  any  familiar  fact  of  knowledge, 
say  a  horse.  My  living  knowledge  of  the  horse  is 
direct  and  absolute,  being  given  in  sense.  You  may, 
if  you  like,  divide  this  knowledge,  for  scientific  pur- 
poses, into  the  two  constitutional  factors  which  it 
involves  to  your  logical  or  reflective  understanding, 
namely:  1.  the  horse,  or  object  known;  2.  the  me, 
or  subject  knowing.  But  this  scientific  practice  no- 
way modifies  the  living  experience  in  question.     It 


TO  MERE  SCIENCE   FOR  CREATIVE  ENDS.  283 

is  obviously  a  mere  logical  analysis  on  your  part  of 
that  living  experience,  by  which  you  attempt  reflec- 
tively or  scientifically  to  resuscitate  the  body  of 
knowledge  after  its  soul  has  fled.  Knowledge — and 
by  knowledge,  mind  you,  I  mean  knowledge  in  its 
true  sense,  as  altogether  actual  or  living ;  as  it  is  in- 
volved, indeed,  in  your  mental  constitution,  and  so 
becomes  the  basis  of  your  subsequent  spiritual  or 
intellectual  manhood ;  and  not  any  mere  beggarly  sci- 
ence, or  learning,  which  is  not  living  knowledge  at 
all,  but  merely  remembered  or  reflected  knowledge, 
such  as  the  people  by  a  fine  instinct  stigmatize  under 
the  name  of  <5oo/?:-knowledge  —  knowledge,  I  say,  is 
within  its  own  precinct  the  living  marriage  of  object 
and  subject;  and  therefore,  like  all  true  marriage, 
annuls  the  possibility  of  their  subsequent  divorce. 
In  livingly  knowing  the  horse,  for  instance,  I  am 
wholly  unconscious  of,  and  indifferent  to,  any  logical 
relation  of  object  and  subject  subsisting  between  us. 
The  only  thing  that  survives  of  this  merely  logical 
and  pedantic  relation  to  my  feeling,  is  the  horse,  or 
ohject  known  ;  while  I,  the  knowing  subject,  am  in- 
continently licked  up  and  disappear  in  his  overpower- 
ing sensible  reality.  Life  or  consciousness,  in  other 
words,  knows  nothing  of  the  relation,  which  is  so 
vital  to  mere  science  or  learning,  of  subject  and 
object  in  existence  as  given  in  sense ;  but  indissolu- 


284  SCIENCE   OR  LEARNING   FLATTERS 

bly  blends,  fuses,  or  marries  them  in  its  own  mirac- 
ulous individuality. 

Thus  life  or  consciousness  —  living  knowledge  or 
perception — defies  analysis,  or  laughs  it  to  scorn  out 
of  its  own  glorified  personality.  And  its  dissection 
consequently  into  object  and  subject  is  possible  only 
when  it  has  become  a  caput  mortimm  in  your  memory, 
or  mental  stomach,  and  been  there  reduced  to  pulp 
by  the  gastric  juice  of  your  ruminant  or  logical  un- 
derstanding. When  you  resolve  any  living  experi- 
ence into  these  purely  logical  constitutional  factors, 
the  result  is  very  good  logic  no  doubt,  but  is  no 
longer  life  or  experience.  Just  as  when  you  chemi- 
cally resolve  water  into  oxygen  and  hydrogen,  the 
issue  of  your  analysis  is  very  good  chemistry,  but  it 
is  no  longer  water.  Oxygen  and  hydrogen  combined 
in  definite  proportions  constitute  the  chemistry  of 
water,  or  give  it  visible  body.  But  they  are  a  very 
long  way  indeed  from  constituting  its  characteristic 
activity,  or  giving  it  soul.  Water  claims  both  a  physi- 
cal co-existence  or  identity  with  all  other  things  ;  and 
a  spiritual  power  or  individuality  of  its  own,  which 
differentiates  it  from  all  other  things,  and  which  all 
the  untamed  gases  of  the  universe  are  unable  either 
to  supply  or  to  explain.  Oxygen  and  hydrogen  per- 
fectly account  for  the  physical  constitution,  or  statical 
repose,   of   water.     But  they  have  no  shadow  of  a 


THE  ILLUSION   OF  SELFHOOD.  285 

pretension  to  account  for  its  dynamic  functioning,  or 
the  spiritual  and  life-giving  power  it  specifically  ex- 
erts over  other  existence. 

So  object  and  subject  no  doubt  constitute  a  very 
good  logical  analysis  of  any  deceased  fact  of  knowl- 
edge ;  but  they  are  heaven-wide  of  any  pretension  to 
constitute  the  least  vital  experience  itself  so-called. 
Knowledge  is  direct  or  miraculous,  being  given  in 
sense  or  gratuitously ;  while  logic,  or  science,  or  learn- 
ing is  indirect  or  reflective,  being  elaborately  gener- 
ated by  our  reasonings  upon  the  data  of  sense.  You 
may  talk  logic  and  chemistry,  consequently,  "  till  all 
is  blue,"  as  the  old  people  say :  you  are  never  in  so 
doing  talking  towards  life,  but  always  steadfastly  away 
from  it.  Philosophy  laughs  at  your  logic  and  your 
chemistry  both  alike,  as  inevitably  predestined  to  come 
limping  along  a  day  after  the  fair,  and  spectrally  revel 
upon  the  stale  victuals  and  drink  which  have  survived 
the  joyous  banquet  of  life.  Science  is  never  life. 
It  is  at  most  the  moon-lit  shadow  of  life  projected 
upon  our  logical  or  reflective  understanding ;  and  the 
method  of  the  one  is  no  less  disproportionate  to  that 
of  the  other  than  earth  is  disproportionate  to  heaven. 
That  is  to  say  :  in  all  living  or  conscious  experience 
the  logical  or  scientific  distinction  of  object  and  sub- 
ject is  utterly  unknown,  hoth  the  alleged  factors  being 
actually  and  indistinguishablg  one,  and  having  no  dis- 


286  THE  OBJECT  IN   KNOWLEDGE  GLORIFIES 

tinction  but  to  your  ruminant  or  reflective  thought. 
Their  unity,  moreover,  is  not  a  simphstic  but  a  strictly 
composite  one,  being  fashioned  in  no  foolish  legal  or 
voluntary  way,  but  in  a  rigidly  free  or  spontaneous 
manner.  In  short,  the  unity  they  realize  is  the  hier- 
archical unity  of  marriage,  in  which  the  masculine  or 
objective  element  is  primary,  commanding,  active ; 
the  feminine  or  subjective  element  secondary,  sub- 
ordinate, passive.  Tor  example  :  in  the  living  experi- 
ence just  supposed  —  called  knowledge  —  the  subject 
is  vivified  exclusively  by  the  object  of  knowledge :  I 
myself  having  absolutely  no  power  to  know  the  horse 
but  what  is  furnished  me  by  the  living  animal  him- 
self. Of  course  I  might  learn  a  good  deal  about  the 
horse  from  books,  from  pictures,  from  hearsay ;  but 
no  amount  of  such  learning  could  ever  pretend  to  be 
convertible  with  an  actual  knowledge  of  the  animal. 
Nothing  is  more  common  than  for  a  very  learned 
man  to  be  a  very  unknowing  one ;  except,  perhaps, 
than  for  a  very  knowing  man  to  be  a  very  unlearned 
one.  If,  indeed,  learning  should  ever  supersede 
knowledge  or  claim  identity  with  it,  the  world  would 
be  in  its  dotage,  and  would  wag  infinitely  worse  I  am 
persuaded  than  it  has  ever  done  hitherto.  Learning 
or  science  is  a  capital  handmaid  of  knowledge  so 
long  as  she  reveres  her  mistress,  or  does  n't  grow  con- 
ceited of  her  own  glittering  livery.     In  that  event  it 


THE  SUBJECT  OUT  OF  SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS.      287 

is  sure  to  be  soon   superseded   by  a  more  modest 
article. 

But  to  return  to  my  subject.  Horses  might  exist 
in  any  number  and  in  great  comfort  all  unknown  to 
me.  But  in  that  case,  of  course,  my  existence  as 
knowing  subject  would  be  so  far  curtailed.  My  ex- 
istence as  a  loioicing  subject  does  not  the  least  date 
from  any  so-called  faculty  of  knowledge  I  am  sup- 
posed to  possess  —  for,  in  point  of  fact,  I  know  abso- 
lutely nothing  by  virtue  of  such  alleged  faculty  —  but 
exclusively  from  the  objects  my  senses  embrace  :  so 
that  /  can  legitimately  he  held  to  knoio  only  in  so  far 
as  objects  exist  to  make  me  hioio.  Take  away,  con- 
sequently, the  object  of  knowledge  (or  thing  known) 
as  our  logicians  do  when  they  resolve  it  into  the 
sensations  of  the  subject  (or  person  knowing),  and 
you  a  fortiori  take  away  the  subject :  for  the  subject 
in  existence  is  logically  constituted  only  by  the  object 
for  which  and  to  which  and  by  which  he  lives. 

This  illustration  drawn  from  our  natural  knowledge 
will  show  you  what  Nature  thinks  of  the  attempt  to 
give  the  primacy  of  the  object  to  the  subject  in  any 
of  her  processes.  For  Nature  manifestly  stamps  the 
objective  element  in  all  natural  functioning  the  only 
real  element,  and  the  subjective  element  altogether 
unreal  or  fallacious  and  misleading  independently  of 
that. 


288   THE  RULE  OF  OUR  NATURAL  KNOWLEDGE 

But  the  specific  use  I  wish  to  make  of  this  illustra- 
tion is  to  shed  light  upon  the  fundamental  method  of 
creation,  or  the  Divine  Incarnation  in  human  nature. 
Accordingly  let  us  now  attempt  to  show  that  what 
we  have  found  to  be  the  rule  of  our  natural  knowl- 
edge is  really  the  rule  also  of  our  natural  life. 

In  the  first  place,  then,  remember,  most  distinctly, 
the  topic  we  are  discussing  —  human  nature :  that  is 
to  say,  the  nature,  not  of  minerals,  nor  of  vegetables, 
nor  of  animals,  but  of  men.  No  doubt  the  nature 
of  these  lower  existences,  if  they  have  any  nature,  is 
included  in  that  of  man,*  but  their  nature  is  anything 
but  human  nature.  Human  nature  is  a  strict  subli- 
mation or  evolution  from  all  lower  physical  forms,  by 
virtue  of  man  containing  an  essential  Divine  or  infi- 
nite element,  which  they  do  not  contain.  But  then 
it  would  be  very  illogical  to  argue  that  because  a 
certain  thing  was  evolved  from  another  thing,  it  was 
therefore  at  all  identical  with  that  thing.     Its  evolu- 

*  By  the  "  nature  "  of  these  existences  one  can  only  mean  their  spe- 
cific  possibilities ;  inasmuch  as  the  nature  of  things,  strictly  speaking, 
expresses  their  universal  and  unitaiy  form,  and  mineral,  vegetable,  and 
animal  existences  expressly  deny  and  reject  the  imputation  of  such  a 
form.  They  cannot  be  classed  as  natural  existences,  accordingly,  save 
iu  so  far  as  they  are  comprehended  in  human  nature,  of  which  they  are 
so  many  discordant  and  conflicting  types  revealed  to  sense,  and  furnish- 
ing therefore  an  inestimably  precious  basis  to  man's  natural  knowledge, 
and  through  that  to  his  spiritual  experience. 


THE  EFLE  OF  OUR  NATURAL  LIFE.  289 

tion  from  it  only  proves  it  to  have  been  —  not  identi- 
cal with  it,  but  distinctly  and  totally  different  from 
it ;  as  different  in  fact  as  heaven  is  from  earth. 

And  then  having  thus  in  the  first  place  remembered 
that  our  sole  subject  is  human  nature,  do  me  the 
favor  in  the  second  place  to  bear  in  mind  what  I  have 
said  about  human  nature  being  altogether  objectively 
constituted,  or  obeying  a  certain  spiritual  end.  Men 
commonly  hold  to  .their  nature  being  altogether  sub- 
jectively constituted  :  that  is,  constituted  by  its  proper 
subjects.  In  other  words,  they  deny  that  their  nature 
is  vitalized  by  any  spiritual  Divine  end,  and  hold  that 
it  is  a  term  designed  merely  to  express  the  total  con- 
tents of  men's  actual  subjectivities.  So  that  if  I  were 
to  put  the  question  to  a  thousand  men  chosen  at  ran- 
dom :  What  does  human  nature  mean  ?  I  doubt  not 
that  nine  hundred  and  ninety-nine  of  them  would  reply: 
It  means  the  outcome  and  aggregate  of  all  men's  pri- 
vate personalities,  of  every  man's  subjective  or  limi- 
tary experience.  But  this  answer  would  be  wholly 
unintelligent,  for  it  would  allow  no  discrimination 
between  our  undefined  nature  and  our  finite  person- 
alities. Men's  personalities  on  the  one  hand  are  all 
that  they  have  within  them  of  most  finite  and  par- 
ticular ;  while  their  nature  on  the  other  hand  is  all 
that  there  is  within  them  of  most  indefinite  and  uni- 
versal.    There  is  to  be  sure  any  amount  of  particulars 


290  OUR  NATURE  — WHAT? 

iiickided  in  a  universal ;  but  no  amount  of  such  par- 
ticulars, were  the  amount  great  enough  to  comprise  all 
the  particulars  beneath  the  sky,  would  ever  avail  by 
themselves  to  constitute  a  universal.  For  universals 
and  particulars  make  two  distinctly  different  genera 
or  kinds,  and  hence  in"  themselves,  or  essentially,  are 
as  reciprocally  conflicting  and  inconvertible  as  truth 
and  fact,  wisdom  and  knowledge,  love  and  self- 
love,  heaven  and  earth,  are  in  -themselves.  That 
is  to  say :  the  logical  difference  between  a  universal 
and  its  particulars  is  not  a  quantitative  difference,  but 
exclusively  a  qualitative  one,  being  the  exact  differ- 
ence of  substance  and  form,*  We  men  undoubtedly 
furnish  the  finite  perishable  stuff  of  human  nature,  or 
the  material  substance  which  the  indwelling  Divine 
life  in  us  moulds  into  immortal  spiritual  form,  just  as 
the  marble  furnishes  the  perishable  material  substance 
of  the  statue.  But  we  have  quite  as  little  share  in 
giving  our  nature  form,  as  the  marble  has  in  giving 
ideal  form  to  the  statue. 

No,  the  form  of  our  nature,  or  its  distinctive  qual- 

*  "  Spiritual  tliouglit,"  says  Swedenborg  {de  Bivind  Sapientia,l^<).  5, 
in  the  6tli  volume  of  Apocahjpsis  Explicata),  "is  altogether  unlike 
natural  thought,  so  much  uulike  that  spiritual  ideas  transcend  natural 
ideas,  and  cannot  be  made  to  coalesce  with  them  save  in  the  way  of  an 
interior  rational  perception :  this  rational  perception  taking  place  no 
othencise  than  by  abstracting  or  removing  quantities  from  qualities." 


AND   HOW  CONSTITUTED?  291 

ity  —  apart  from  which  it  has  no  cognizable  existence, 
being  sunk  in  the  abject  shme  of  oiir  disunited  or  war- 
ring personahties  —  is  wholly  derived  from  its  objec- 
tive element,  or  the  uses  it  subserves  to  the  evolution 
in  us  of  a  Divine-natural  manhood.  The  technical 
"  church,"  ending  in  the  life,  death,  and  resurrection 
of  Jesus  Christ,  has  been  throughout  history  a  witness 
of  this  coming  glorification  of  our  nature.  But  the 
church  has  always  misconceived  its  own  mission.  It 
has  always  conceived  its  mission  to  lie  —  not  simply 
in  bearing  witness  to  the  miraculous  facts  of  Christ's 
career  —  but  much  more,  in  converting  these  miracu- 
lous facts  into  so  many  spiritual  truths  which  men  are 
bound  to  receive  solely  upon  its  own  dogmatic  author- 
ity. There  could  not  be  in  the  nature  of  things  a 
more  unfounded  and  undivine  pretension  than  this. 
Men  gratefully  receive  and  confide  in  the  church's 
testimony  in  regard  to  all  the  literal  Christian  facts, 
whether  ordinary  or  miraculous,  but  especially  the 
miraculous  ones  —  because,  as  I  have  said  before, 
miracle  is  the  only  evidence  and  sanction  of  a  Divine 
revelation  which  a  carnal  or  sensuous  mind  is  capable 
of  receiving.  But  when  the  chiu'ch  assumes  now  as 
of  old  to  be  the  authorized  interpreter  of  these  facts 
to  the  intellect  of  men,  and  to  impose  her  authority 
upon  them  as  final,  she  cannot  fail  to  provoke  a  revolt 
whose  only  issue  must  be  the  acknowledgment  of  her 


292  THE  CHURCH'S  TESTIMONY 

utter  spiritual  triviality  and  imbecility.  The  Chris- 
tian facts  are  of  inestimable  value  to  the  intellect 
in  furnishing  a  fixed  immovable  basis  to  thought 
in  reference  to  Divine  things,  and  hence  a  guide  to 
speculation  in  reference  to  the  developments  of  human 
destiny;  and  all  modest  and  reasonable  minds,  as  I 
conceive,  will  be  prompt  to  bless  the  church  accord- 
ingly for  the  signally  pointed  and  consistent  testi- 
mony she  has  always  borne  to  these  facts  amidst  the 
darkness,  indifference,  and  conflict  of  men's  opinions. 
But  I  must  say  that  no  independent  mind  cares  a  jot 
for  the  church's  traditional  judgment  of  the  Divine 
and  human  meaning  (that  is,  the  strictly  intellectual 
meaning)  which  has  always  been  latent  in  the  facts, 
and  so  marvellously  adapts  them  to  our  nascent  spir- 
itual intelligence.  In  fact  one  would  be  inclined  to 
rate  the  judgment  of  any  honest  living  mind  in  all 
that  line  of  inquiry,  as  of  vastly  superior  worth. 

Every  one  will  admit  that  the  church,  in  thus  at- 
testing the  integrity  of  the  Christian  facts,  has  played 
a  vitally  important  part  in  the  education  of  the  human 
mind ;  but  I  maintain,  moreover,  that  this  attesting 
function  of  the  church  has  furnished  her  only  true 
claim  to  men's  respect,  a  claim  infinitely  transcending 
that  based  upon  her  usurped  dogmatic  authority. 
There  is  no  function  in  life  half  so  honorable  or 
venerable  to  the  heart  of  man  as  that  of  a  nursing 


TO  THE  CHRISTIAN  FACTS.  293 

mother ;  and  this  is  the  exact  relation  which  the 
church  was  meant  to  stand  in  towards  the  mind. 
She  had  nothing  to  do  hut  administer  the  pm'e  milk 
of  the  Gospel  to  her  offspring,  leaving  its  spiritual 
assimilation  by  them,  and  its  subsequent  conversion 
into  good  solid  intellectual  flesh  and  bone,  to  the  ex- 
quisite providence  which  watched  with  like  assiduity 
over  it  and  them.  When  I  was  a  tender  babe  on 
my  mother's  knee,  feeling  as  yet  no  personal  con- 
sciousness beyond  the  cravings  of  my  insatiate  little 
stomach,  it  would  have  been  an  egregious  outrage  to 
my  intellectual  innocence  to  have  put  upon  me  also 
the  providence  and  preparation  of  my  needful  food. 
Now  the  intellect,  in  its  infancy,  is  nothing  else  than 
a  mental  stomach,  or  ravenous  memory,  which  craves 
nothing  but  a  fixed  motherly  lap  of  knowledge  to 
cradle  and  nourish  its  nascent  powers,  until  such  time 
as  it  is  fit  to  enter  for  itself  upon  the  administration 
of  its  spiritual  heritage.  How  sheerly  preposterous, 
therefore,  would  it  be  to  expect  it  —  as  our  twittering 
"  free-religionists  "  do  —  to  sit  in  judgment  upon  the 
food  of  succulent  knowledge  thus  presented  to  it,  and 
critically  determine  whether  it  be  true  or  false,  fit  or 
unfit,  before  its  small  high  mightiness  deigns  to  re- 
ceive it !  With  precisely  equal  propriety  you  might 
expect  the  child  to  sit  in  judgment  on  its  mother's 
milk,  and  decide  before  receiving  it  whether  it  be  the 


294  THE   REALM  OF  FACT  INFERIOR 

distillation  of  a  chaste  or  an  unchaste  bosom.  What 
a  prodigy  of  nastiness  would  you  make  of  the  inno- 
cent child  at  his  maturity,  in  the  one  case !  And 
what  an  essentially  petty  and  pedantic  role  must  you 
suppose  the  intellect  destined  to  fulfil  at  its  maturity, 
in  the  other  ! 

I  confess  for  my  part  that  I  should  as  soon  think 
of  spitting  upon  my  mother's  grave,  or  offering  any 
other  offence  to  her  stainless  memory,  as  of  question- 
ing any  of  the  Gospel  facts.  And  this,  not  because  I 
regard  them  as  literally  or  absolutely  true  —  for  the 
whole  realm  of  fact  is  as  far  beneath  that  of  truth,  as 
earth  is  beneath  heaven  — but  simply  because  they 
furnish  the  indispensable  word,  or  master-key,  to  our 
interpretation  of  God's  majestic  revelation  of  Himself 
in  human  nature.  When  accordingly  I  am  asked 
whether  I  believe  in  the  literal  facts  of  Christ's  birth 
from  a  virgin,  his  resurrection  from  death,  his  ascen- 
sion into  heaven,  and  so  forth,  I  feel  constrained  to 
reply :  That  I  neither  believe  in  them  nor  disbelieve, 
because  the  sphere  of  fact  is  the  sphere  of  men's 
knowledge,  exclusively,  and  therefore  invites  neither 
belief  nor  disbelief ;  but  that  I  have  a  most  profound, 
even  a  heartfelt,  conviction  of  the  truth  which  they, 
and  they  alone,  reveal,  namely,  the  truth  of  God's 
essentially/  human  perfection,  and,  as  implied  in  that, 
the  amazing  truth  of  His  statural  or  adventitious  man- 


TO  THE  REALM  OF  TEUTH.  295 

hood :  which  conviction  keeps  me  blessedly  indifferent 
to,  and  utterly  unvexed  by,  the  cheap  and  frivolous 
scepticism  with  which  so  many  of  our  learned  modern 
pundits  assail  them.  I  have  not  the  least  reverence 
nor  even  respect  for  the  facts  in  question,  save  as 
basing  or  ultimating  this  grand  creative  or  spiritual 
truth  ;  and  while  the  truth  stands  to  my  apprehension, 
I  shall  be  serenely  obdurate  to  the  learned  reason- 
ings of  any  of  my  contemporaries  in  regard  to  the 
facts,  whether  pro  or  con.  I  know,  to  be  sure,  all 
that  the  sceptics  know  about  them,  that  is,  that  they 
have  come  down  to  us  from  apparently  honest  and 
intelligent  men,  who  themselves  knew,  or  thought 
they  knew,  them  to  have  occurred  as  they  are  reported 
to  us.  But,  unlike  the  sceptics,'  I  am  content  and 
more  than  content  to  receive  the  facts  upon  the  testi- 
mony of  these  simple  men,  because  they  appeal  so 
strongly  to  my  heart,  or  seem  to  be  the  homely  and 
harmless  anchorage  or  ultimate  of  most  vital  and 
otherwise  unattainable  Divine  knowledge.  If  Christ 
and  his  apostles  had  professed  the  desire  and  inten- 
tion to  convey  mere  stupid  scientific  knowledge  to 
men  :  that  is,  the  knowledge  that  precedes  regeneration, 
and  is  loholly  independent  of  it:  the  great  mass  of 
mankind  would  have  remained  forever  deaf  to  their 
teaching,  for  there  is  happily  no  Divine  thirst  in  men 
after  scientific  information  ;  and  I  for  one  would  cheer- 


296  UNHAPPY   RESULTS  TO  THE  INTELLECT 

fully  leave  them  in  that  case  to  the  tender  mercies 
of  any  ambitious  scavenger  who  jnight  enhance  his 
own  reputation  with  unintelligent  people  by  throwing 
scientific  mud  at  them.  But  as  they  did  n't  at  all 
profess  this  commonplace  ambition,  —  as  their  sole 
desire  was  to  commend  to  men  a  new  and  living  reve- 
lation of  God,  based  upon  a  spiritual  creation  of  man, 
i.  e,  upon  affections  and  thoughts  in  men  deeper  than 
those  which  they  inherit  from  their  past  ancestry, 
or  derive  from  the  little  world  of  consciousness  and 
convention  about  them,  I  see  no  reason  why  we  should 
not  regard  the  malignant  criticism  they  receive  at  the 
hands  of  our  popular  scientific  scribes,  as  a  virtual 
confession  on  the  part  of  these  latter  that  they  know 
nothing  of,  and  are  signally  incompetent  to,  the  merits 
of  the  question  they  have  undertaken  to  discuss. 

But,  in  addition  to  all  this,  I  have  no  hesitation 
in  avowing  that  I  for  my  part  am  thoroughly  sick 
and  tired  of  regulating  my  intellectual  life  on  any 
principle  of  scientific  certitude,  because  this  in  the 
long  run  is  to  make  sense  the  arbiter  of  the  mind. 
No  doubt  man  is  by  creation  both  internal  and  ex- 
ternal, and  his  voluntary  or  rational  mind,  which 
intervenes  between  the  two  discordant  spheres  and 
enables  him  eventually  to  harmonize  their  interests, 
may  doubtless  determine  itself  towards  either  interest 
in   preference  to  the  other.      But  I  am  persuaded 


IN   TETHERING  IT  TO  SENSE.  297 

that  if  it  determine  itself  towards  science  or  the 
senses,  the  result  to  one's  spiritual  understanding 
cannot  help  being  disastrous  in  the  extreme.  I  am 
sure  at  all  events  that  it  would  be  to  the  last  degree 
disastrous  in  my  own  case.  For  science  takes  no 
cognizance  but  of  finite  existence.  To  what  exists 
infinitely  or  in  itself,  and  is  therefore  undiscerned 
and  unauthenticated  by  the  senses,  she  is  as  blind 
and  deaf  as  the  stone.  And  consequently  if  I 
should  allow  my  intellectual  life  to  be  ruled  by 
science,  I  should  cease  to  have  any  intellectual  life 
left.  For  one's  intellect  is  the  child  of  a  double 
parentage,  the  offspring  of  a  marriage-union  between 
goodness  and  truth.  But  goodness  is  essentially 
invisible  and  incognizable  to  sense,  being  infinite, 
and  therefore  altogether  livingly  or  spiritually  dis- 
cerned. The  only  good  that  the  senses  recognize 
is  a  finite  good,  a  good  limited  by  evil.  And  even 
truth  is  never  discerned  by  the  senses  in  direct  or 
positive,  but  always  in  indirect  or  inverse  form. 
My  intellect  accordingly,  if  it  should  succumb  to 
the  limitations  of  science,  or  deliberately  submit 
itself  to  the  arbitrament  of  sense,  would  virtually 
renounce  the  whole  of  its  characteristic  life,  which 
lies  in  a  heartfelt  surrender  to  infinite  goodness  and 
truth,  and  is  compatible  with  no  other  or  lesser 
instinct.     In  fact,  I  should  be  incapable  in  that  case 


298  ATTITUDE  OF  MEN  OF  SCIENCE. 

of  believing  in  truth  at  all  save  under  the  guise 
of  a  probability.  For  scientific  certainty  is  never  a 
certainty  of  what  is  infinitely  true,  i.  e.  true  in  it- 
self, but  only  of  what  is  true  to  oui-  intelligence, 
i.  e.  of  what  is  merely  phenomenally  true,  or  prob- 
able, and  may  therefore  be  denied  even  all  prob- 
ability to-morrow.  What  an  intolerable  bondage 
this  would  be  to  the  intellect,  to  have  the  heart's 
capacity  of  belief  limited  by  the  grovelling  senses  ! 
It  would  be  the  blighting  of  human  nature  at  its 
very  root,  or  its  reduction  to  less  even  than  bestial 
freedom  and  innocence  !  Such,  moreover,  I  am  per- 
suaded is  the  practical  attitude  at  this  day  of  all 
genuine  men  of  science.  They  are  none  of  them 
livingly  ruled  by  science,  or  submit  the  life  of  their 
intellect  to  its  unwise  and  impertinent  stewardship. 
They  all  —  unless  they  are  men  of  unworthy  lives 
to  begin  with,  which  is  a  supposition  not  to  be 
thought  of  in  reference  to  any  sincere  devotee  of 
science  —  firmly  believe  in  a  good  whose  existence 
science  is  totally  impotent  on  her  own  principles 
either  to  afhrm  or  deny,  and  they  none  of  them 
believe  even  in  a  truth  which  the  senses  by  them- 
selves are  competent  to  confirm,  or  which  they  do 
not  become  qualified  to  confirm  solely  by  having 
undergone  the  previous  discipline  and  correction  of 
the  intellect. 


DIFFERENCE   BETWEEN   SCIENCE   AND  FAITH.      299 

The  long  and  the  short  of  the  whole  matter  is 
that  what  men  call  true  in  science,  is  not  the  truth 
they  intellectually  or  spiritually  apprehend.  The 
two  orders  of  truth  differ  fundamentally,  one  being 
based  in  sensible  experience,  the  experience  com- 
mon to  the  race,  and  not  worth  a  jot  but  as  in- 
volving it;  the  other  originating  in  inward  percep- 
tion, and  claiming  therefore  a  rigidly  individual 
ground  or  basis.  Thus  the  law  of  universal  gravi- 
tation —  the  law  which  imports  that  all  the  bodiea 
of  the  universe  attract  each  other  with  a  force 
directly  proportioned  to  the  mass  of  matter  they 
contain,  and  inversely  proportioned  to  the  squares 
of  their  distances  —  is  a  scientific  truth,  that  is,  one 
whose  existence  depends  upon  its  strict  universality, 
or  its  involving  all  things  in  its  grasp  whether  they 
know  it  or  not.  And  the  truth  of  the  Divine  be- 
ing and  existence  —  the  truth  which  imports  that 
all  men  are  derivative  or  created  existences,  and 
enjoy  therefore  a  strictly  fallacious  life  in  theimelves 
—  is  an  intellectual  or  spiritual  truth,  but  it  is  a 
truth  which  falls  wholly  within  consciousness.  That 
is  to  say,  this  truth  unlike  the  other  is  never  the 
interpretation  of  men's  common  or  outward  experi- 
ence, but  is  a  result  exclusively  of  their  inward  cul- 
ture or  refining.  No  man  believes  it  in  virtue  of  any 
force  of  intellect  he  possesses,  still  less  in  virtue  of 


300         THE   GOSPEL   UNTRUE  TIDINGS   TO   EVERY 

any  degree  of  natural  goodness  or  gentleness  he  is 
born  to.  Every  man,  who  believes  it  at  all,  —  that 
is,  who  believes  it  not  as  a  mere  hereditary  tradition, 
but  with  his  spirit  or  life,  —  believes  it  as  the  effect 
of  a  decided  inward  discipline,  or  genuine  individual 
culture,  awakening  a  heart-craving  for  it,  i.  e.  telling 
him  that  it  is  supremely  (jood  to  believe  it,  that  for 
him  indeed  eternal  death  and  damnation  lie  in  his 
not  believing  it ;  and  in  comparison  therefore  with  this 
most  excellent  knowledge,  the  science  or  learning  of 
all  worlds  is  as  the  small  dust  of  the  balance  in  his 
sight.  In  other  words  :  every  one  who  believes  it 
does  so  with  the  heart  first,  and  the  intellect  after- 
wards :  that  is,  believes  it  primarily  as  good,  and  not 
as  truth.  This,  and  this  alone,  is  why  I  beheve  any 
Divine  truth  :  because  my  heart  fiercely  hungers  after 
it,  and  stamps  every  thing  false  and  foul  that  con- 
flicts —  or  even  comes  into  passing  rivalry  —  with  it. 
What  does  it  matter  to  me  that  some  cold-blooded 
prig  or  pedant  is  able  to  demonstrate  the  scientific 
untruth  of  my  belief?  Have  I  ever  pretended  that 
it  had  any  scientific  basis  or  justification  ?  Do  I  not 
know  in  all  my  bones  that  the  tendency  of  science, 
and  the  whole  current  of  men's  servile  opinion,  run 
directly  counter  to  it  ?  Do  you  think  that  I  love 
it  any  the  less  on  that  account?  Do  you  think 
that  my  fierce   relish    for   it    is  not    all    the  while 


ONE  WHO  DOES  NOT  FIRST   FIND    IT  GOOD.        301 

quickened  and  fomented  by  this  popular  and  scien- 
tific indifference  to  it  ?  Or  that  the  gainsaying  of 
it  by  all  the  world,  vulgar  and  polite,  would  have 
any  other  effect  upon  me  than  driving  me  joyfully 
to  die  for  it?  And  I  should  like  to  know  what 
man  ever  went  to  death  for  a  scientific  truth.  Gali- 
leo, I  believe,  declined  to  do  so,  and  for  the  very 
good  reason  no  doubt  that  he  did  not  feel  his 
highest  life  involved  in  any  truth  of  science.  Other- 
wise he  could  have  hardly  rejected  the  auspicious 
opportunity  offered  him  by  the  church  of  his  day, 
to  assert  and  signally  illustrate  that  life.  "  Scien- 
tific untruth  of^  my  belief,"  indeed !  Words  are  not 
able  to  express  my  joy  that  men's  belief  has  no 
scientific  basis,  that  is,  no  basis  in  their  sensible 
experience,  because  then  my  heart  and  mind  would 
depend  for  their  beggarly  life  upon  the  heart  and 
mind  of  other  men,  and  I  should  have  no  direct 
inspiration  from  Him  who  now  fills  me  with  these 
fragrant  tides  of  love  and  joy  and  worship. 

We  may  say  in  fact,  that  nowhere  in  Christen- 
dom, outside  the  professing  Christian  church,  do  we 
find  the  human  mind  backward  to  admit  that  its 
allegiance  is  due  primarily  to  good,  and  only  deriv- 
atively to  truth.  The  revelation  in  Jesus  Christ  of 
God's  incarnate  perfection  may  be  called  the  definite 
inauguration  of  the  heart's  sole  authority  thenceforth 


302  MAN'S  ALLEGIANCE  HENCEFORTH  DUE 

in  the  sphere  of  belief.  His  manifestation  in  Christ 
as  a  natural  man,  even  in  ultimates  or  personal  form, 
that  is,  clown  to  the  assumption  of  flesh  and  bones, 
and  Ilis  consequent  exaltation  of  human  nature  itself 
out  of  limitary  into  universal  dimensions,  so  making 
it  thenceforth  the  only  true  measure  of  infinitude, 
appeals  for  sanction  to  the  heart's  deepest  instincts 
of  Divine  good,  and  disclaims  the  superficial  hom- 
age of  the  intellect,  save  in  so  far  as  the  intellect 
itself  is  shaped  and  enlarged  by  the  experience  of  the 
heart.  For  the  heart  is  vi^iat  alone  universalizes 
man  to  the  dimensions  of  his  kind,  and  unites  him 
with  it,  while  the  intellect,  fed  by  sense,  restricts  him 
to  the  most  meagre  personal  form,  or  divides  him 
from  it.  The  heart  alone  consequently  is  capable  of 
acknowledging  a  Divine  or  universal  truth,  and  the 
intellect  derives  all  its  capacity  of  similar  acknowl- 
edgment from  it.  Now  unquestionably  human  na- 
ture embraces  all  that  man  is  capable  of  recognizing 
as  Divine  good ;  and  Jesus  Christ  accordingly  in 
revealing  to  the  faith  of  his  disciples  the  Divine 
and  human  unity,  that  is,  the  truth  of  God's  inti- 
mate and  perfect  natural  humanity,  has  forever 
exalted  good  to  the  sovereignty  of  human  affection, 
and  relegated  truth  to  a  comparatively  inferior  or 
subordinate  place.  Every  man  of  intellect  and  con- 
science feels,  accordingly,  by  an  indomitable  Divine 


TO  DIVINE-NATURAL  GOOD   ALONE.  303 

instinct  of  the  truth,  that  his  own  particular  nature 
is  not  human  nature,  but  rather  a  caricature  of  it; 
feels  that  it  is  shockingly  inhuman  in  fact,  because 
its  universal  element,  or  what  relates  him  to  the 
neighbor,  is  so  inactive  or  poorly  developed  com- 
pared with  its  personal  or  individual  element,  which 
relates  him  to  self.  Every  man,  in  other  words,  of 
spiritual  or  living  culture  throughout  history  has 
felt  his  particular  nature  to  be  unmixed  evil,  has 
felt  in  very  truth  that  he  himself  was  no  man,  and 
has  always  appealed  to  God  consequently  with  tears 
of  penitence  and  humiliation,  as  his  only  hope  and 
succor  against  himself.  Thus  Jesus  Christ  in  iden- 
tifying man's  religious  aspiration  with  the  redemption 
and  salvation  of  human  nature  from  the  evils  inci- 
dent to  every  man's  particular  nature,  and  its  eon- 
sequent  eternal  union  with  the  Divine  infinitude, 
has  exalted  religion  itself  out  of  a  wretched  ritual 
or  ceremonial  worship,  into  the  diligent  handmaiden 
and  minister  of  every  man's  unadulterate  natural 
good. 


LETTER     XXII. 


|S^^^  Y  DEAR  FRIEND :  — I  have  been  digress- 
•  K  il  "r^i^  ■  ^"o  sadly,  and  must  forthwith  return  to 
■fepS^^m  my  thesis.  I  was  saying,  when  my  pen 
took  another  direction,  that  the  form  of 
human  nature,  or  its  distinctive  quahty,  apart  from 
which  it  has  no  real  existence,  is  derived  wholly  from 
its  objective  element,  or  the  uses  it  subserves  to  the 
evolution  in  the  earth  of  a  Divine-natural  manhood. 
And  I  have  certainly  no  desire  to  divert  your  atten- 
tion from  this  statement,  since  all  our  intellectual 
accord  depends  upon  your  doing  full  and  frank 
justice  to  it.  Eor  the  uses  referred  to  constitute  the 
sole  actual  presence  of  God  in  our  nature,  being  all 
spiritually  fulfilled  in  the  nature  coming  to  form,  or, 
what  is  the  same  thing,  in  the  advent  of  a  perfect 
society,  fellowship,  or  equality  of  all  men  with  each 
and  of  each  man  with  all  men,  on  earth  or  in  heaven. 
The  technical  Christian  church  in  simply  bearing  wit- 
ness to  the   gospel  facts^  has  unconsciously  but  un- 


~    THE  STATE  CULMINATES  IN  THE  REPUBLIC.       305 

falteringly  ministered  to  these  providential  uses  in 
nurturing  and  giving  birth  to  the  Christian  state, 
which  is  the  initial  objective  or  actual  form  under 
which  God's  spiritual  incarnation  in  our  nature  be- 
comes realized.  The  rudiment  of  the  State  under  all 
its  forms,  even  the  most  expanded,  is  the  marriage 
institution,  engendering  the  family  unity.  For  out  of 
this  small  unit  of  the  family  grows  successively  the 
larger  unities  of  the  tribe,  or  unity  of  many  fami- 
lies ;  of  the  city,  or  unity  of  many  tribes ;  of  the 
nation,  or  unity  of  many  cities ;  and  finally  of  the 
republic,  or  unity  of  many  nations.  These  successive 
political  structures  have  been  only  the  material  scaf- 
folding by  means  of  which  God's  spiritual  edifice  in 
human  nature  has  gradually  worked  itself  out  to 
men's  recognition ;  and  accordingly,  now  that  the  full 
dayhght  of  Divine  truth  is  upon  us,  they  only  spirit- 
ually obscure  what  they  once  obediently  promoted. 
For  their  pretension  is  (and  in  this  pretension  they 
are  dihgently  backed  by  a  mercenary  and  menda- 
cious church)  that  they  do  not  constitute  the  mere 
provisional  scaffolding  of  God's  great  edifice  in  hu- 
man nature,  but  the  very  edifice  itself;  and  they 
consequently  influence  men's  minds  to  every  down- 
ward base  issue,  instead  of  inflaming  them  to  noble 
upright  endeavors  and  aspirations.  But,  as  I  have 
said,  all    these   political    structures    attain    to    their 


306        THE  REPUBLIC  ENDS  OUR  POLITICAL  LIFE. 

climax  and  culmination  in  the  republic,  whence 
their  decline  becomes  swift  and  eternal.  The  rea- 
son why  the  republic  is  necessarily  the  final  form 
of  God's  institutional  or  educative  providence  in 
human  aifairs,  is  because  the  republic  makes  it  im- 
possible  to  realize  any  larger  literal  order  among 
men,  any  more  expansive  form  of  merely  instituted 
or  enforced  fellowship  among  them,  and  so  inevita- 
bly gives  way  itself  at  last  to  a  free  spontaneous 
society,  or  a  spiritual  unforced  fellowship  of  each 
and  all  men,  as  the  supreme  development  of  human 
destiny,  because  such  a  destiny  alone  befits  man's 
human  or  God-given  nature.  And  the  reason  why 
the  republic  makes  it  impossible  to  conceive  of  any 
larger  literal  form  of  Divine  administration  on  earth, 
is  that  the  republic  is  the  government  of  the  people 
by  chosen  representatives  of  the  people,  without  ref- 
erence to  smaller  political  or  customary  divisions. 
And  surely  nothing  larger  in  the  way  of  literal  ad- 
ministrative rule  can  be  imagined  than  a  government 
whose  only  sanction  is  the  will  of  the  whole  people. 

Thus  the  republic  inaugurates  a  change  from  a 
literal  or  seeming  order  to  a  spiritual  or  real  one  in 
the  Divine  administration  of  human  life.  Now  what 
is  the  exact  distinction  here  announced?  What  is 
the  exact  difference  between  spirit  and  letter,  between 
reality  and  appearance,   between  a  universal  and  a 


-    THE  ANGELS  AN  IMPERFECT  WORK  OF  GOD.     307 

partial  order?  And  what  is  the  necessary  ground 
of  such  distinction  in  the  Divine  economy?  Why 
does  the  Divine  housekeeping  in  our  nature  admit, 
nay  prescribe  and  exact  this  immense  difference  in 
things?  If  we  come  to  a  good  understanding  on 
this  point,  we  shall  be  likely  to  disagree  on  no  other. 
The  difference  in  question,  then,  is  the  exact  dif- 
ference between  a  regimen  of  good  enforced  by  the 
heart,  and  one  of  truth  enforced  by  the  intellect. 
That  is  to  say :  it  is  the  difference  between  inward, 
free,  spontaneous  action  on  the  one  hand,  and  out- 
ward, voluntary,  prudential,  or  deliberate  action  on 
the  other.  If  indeed  your  ear  were  broken  in  to 
a  logical  distinction  which  Swedenborg's  necessities 
constantly  compel  him  to  make,  I  could  more  briefly 
define  the  difference  by  saying  that  literal  order  is 
motived  by  a  sentiment  of  ditty  in  its  subject,  and 
spiritual  order  by  a  sentiment  of  delight.  Thus  the 
exact  difference  involved  is  that  between  our  moral 
and  our  aesthetic  culture :  between  the  life  of  obedi- 
ence to  truth  in  his  intellect  which  a  man  lives  in 
preparation  for  his  regeneration,  and  which  is  always 
a  life  of  more  or  less  painful  death  to  himself,  and 
that  which  he  lives  from  the  inspiration  of  good  in 
his  heart,  after  his  regeneration  is  complete.  Swe- 
denborg  found  the  regeneration  of  the  angels  very 
incomplete,   apparently  because  the  doctrine  of  the 


308  SWEDENBORG'S  INDICTMENT  OF 

Lord,  that  is,  of  the  Divine  assumption  and  glorifica- 
tion of  human  nature,  had  so  Httle  spiritual  recogni- 
tion among  them.  Their  regeneration  was  the  fruit  of 
moral  culture,  or  obedience  to  law,  involving  of  course 
more  or  less  self-denial ;  whereas  the  fundamental 
idea  of  Christianity  is  the  redemption  of  man's  nature 
to  God,  or  the  making  him  sjjontaneoushj  regenerate, 
regenerate  tUroiigh  natural  taste  or  attraction.  Swe- 
denborg  represents  the  angels,  accordingly,  as  in- 
debted exclusively  to  the  restraining  influences  of  the 
Divine  power,  that  they  do  not  rush  headlong  into 
infernal  evil.  For  in  regeneration  the  evil  is  never 
separated  from  man,  but  is  only  rendered  innocuous 
or  quiescent,  so  as  actually  to  appear  annihilated, 
when  really  it  is  not  at  all  so.  Such  is  the  state  of 
the  angels.  So  far  as  their  own  knowledge  goes, 
they  do  not  know  but  that  they  are  separated  from 
evil,  but  in  truth  they  are  only  providentially  re- 
strained from  it,  which  makes  their  evil  quiescent 
and  apparently  annihilates  it.  Bat  this  separation  is 
only  an  appearance,  which  the  angels  themselves  dis- 
cover upon  reflection.*  In  short  it  is  Swedenborg's 
uniform  testimony  that  the  selfhood  in  angels  no  less 
than  in  men  is  altogether  false  and  evil.f  Doubt  on 
this  point,  he  says,  disqualifies  a  man  for  heavenly  so- 
ciety.    Indeed  I  might  cite  any  number  of  passages 

*  Arcana  Calestia,  1581.  f  Uid.,  033.     See  also  6S1. 


THE  ANGELIC  PERSONALITY.  309 

from  his  books  in  which  he  profoundly  affronts  our  most 
inveterate  ecclesiastical  superstitions,  by  reporting  that 
the  angels  of  themselves  or  of  their  own  nature  bear 
a  very  sinister  relation  to  goodness  and  truth,  just  as 
sinister  a  one  as  any  of  the  infernals, 

I  think  this  a  very  serious  indictment  of  the  an- 
gelic personality,  as  that  personality  is  ordinarily 
conceived  by  us,  and  well  worthy  of  men's  philo- 
sophic scrutiny.  "  There  is  with  man  no  understand- 
ing of  truth,  nor  any  will  of  goodness :  but  when  he 
becomes  a  denizen  of  heaven,  it  appears  as  if  he 
possesses  these  things,  when  nevertheless  he  knows, 
acknowledges,  and  perceives  that  they  are  of  the 
Lord  alone."  These  possessions  are  in  fact  the  posi- 
tive presence  of  God  in  him,  constituting  all  he  shall 
ever  really  know  of  God.  Never  was  a  doctrine 
propounded  by  living  man,  more  revolting  to  flesh 
and  blood  than  this.  And  yet  the  wise  old  man 
was  so  devoted  to  it,  heart  and  mind,  and  brings 
such  an  amazing  amount  of  striking  experience,  ob- 
servation, and  angelic  testimony  to  corroborate  it, 
that  it  cannot  fail  some  day  to  attract  the  attention 
of  philosophic  minds.  The  so-called  "  Swedcnbor- 
gians  "  may  be  left  out  of  our  account  altogether  : 
for  these  preposterous  people  are  so  bent  upon  adding 
another  to  the  Christian  sects  by  devoutly  plaf/ing 
"  New  Church  "  and  "  New  Jerusalem  "  every  Sun- 


310  HE  SHOWS  IT  SEVERELY  MINISTERIAL 

day  to  complacent  handfuls  of  men  and  women,  and 
so  trying  to  impose  upon  the  world  the  fiction  that 
Swedenborg  himself  is  an  accomplice  of  the  stu- 
pidity, that  they  actually  do  nothing  but  disgust  all 
right-minded  men  with  his  books.  But  how  many 
fairly  honest  and  competent  minds  nowadays,  think 
you,  minds  freed  from  sectarian  sottishness,  and 
hating  the  influence  of  the  sects  upon  the  world  as 
they  hate  the  jaws  of  hell,  have  recourse  to  these 
modest  volumes  to  find  a  clew  out  of  our  gathering 
political  and  social  perplexities  ?  Their  number 
might  almost  be  counted  on  the  fingers.  Yet  I  am 
fully  persuaded  that  such  men  will  find  intellectual 
relief  nowhere  else;  and  nowhere  in  Swedenborg 
half  so  readily  as  in  thoroughly  mastering  the  truth 
that  we  are  now  canvassing,  namely :  the  truth  of 
man's  (and  hence  the  angel's)  limited  freedom  or 
selfhood. 

I  said  however  just  now  that  no  truth  could  be 
more  revolting  to  our  "  flesh  and  blood  "  personality, 
or  the  pride  of  individuality  in  us,  than  this.  Clearly 
this  effect  is  owing  to  the  immense  natural  illusion 
we  are  under  in  respect  to  our  flesh-and-blood  per- 
sonality. For  a  very  long  while  this  personality 
constitutes  literally  all  we  know  of  life.  The  whole 
realm  of  sense  is  its  appanage  either  as  ministering 
to  our  material  support,  or  as  serving  our  varied  fac- 


-      TO  A  WORK  OF  GOD  IN  HUMAN  NATURE.         311 

iilties  of  intelligence.  In  our  ignorance  and  inex- 
perience of  any  higher  or  truer  life,  what  wonder  is 
it  then  that  we  should  deem  ourselves  the  best  re- 
sult of  God's  creative  power,  and  look  upon  life  as 
absolutely  our  own  ?  And  yet  the  whole  persuasion 
is  a  downright  fallacy.  There  is  absolutely  no  such 
thing  in  nature  as  a  finite  selfhood  or  an  indepen- 
dent personality.  The  conception  of  such  an  exist- 
ence belongs  wholly  to  our  own  crazy  way  of  en- 
visaging creation,  that  is,  regarding  it  primarily  as  a 
material  or  quantitative  result,  rather  than  a  spiritual 
or  qualitative  one.  We  are  taught  to  call  God  in- 
finite to  be  siu-e,  but  only  because  we  have  been  first 
taught  to  call  ourselves  finite.  In  reality,  however, 
we  deem  God  the  most  finite  of  beings,  the  most 
essentially  absolute  or  independent  of  beings.  This 
is  our  own  ideal  of  human  perfection,  or  the  mode 
of  existence  we  most  aspire  to  for  ourselves ;  and  it 
is  not  marvellous  therefore  that  we  attribute  the 
full  enjoyment  of  it  to  God  our  creator.  Endowing 
the  creature  as  we  do  in  imagination  with  his  own 
inward  life  or  being,  we  necessarily  relegate  God  to 
an  exclusively  outward  position  towards  him,  and 
thus  are  compelled  to  finite  the  creator  by  all  the 
breadth  of  creation.  In  short,  notwithstanding  our 
vague  and  crude  ascriptions  of  a  nominal  infinitude 
to  Him,  we   really  or  in   thought  make  II im,  as  I 


312  MAN'S  PRIVATE  SELFHOOD  THE  ONLY 

have  said,  the  most  finite  or  restricted  of  beings, 
and  rob  Him  of  His  rightful  infinitude  the  better 
to  adorn  our  factitious  selves  with  it.  But  I  do  not 
hesitate  for  my  own  part  utterly  to  scout  this  mate- 
rialistic hypothesis  of  the  relation  between  creator 
and  creatiu-e  as  having  no  ground  in  the  essential 
truth  of  the  case. 

I  do  not  hesitate,  for  example,  to  express  my  con- 
viction that  the  distinction  between  creature  and 
creator  is  not  the  least  a  sensible  or  objective  fact, 
but  a  purely  rational  or  subjective  truth.  It  is  not 
at  all  true  that  man  presents  any  antagonism  with 
the  infinite  in  his  outward  or  public  and  universal 
aspect,  that  is,  as  an  organic  subject,  or  subject  of 
sense ;  but  only  in  his  inward,  private,  or  particular 
aspect  as  an  inorganic  subject,  or  subject  of  conscious- 
ness. My  physical  organization  which  passively 
unites  me  with  the  universal  realm  of  existence,  ob- 
viously does  not  disunite  me  with  the  creator,  since 
in  that  case  I  should  cease  to  live,  because  I  am 
essentially  a  created  existence;  but  only  my  meta- 
physical or  inorganic  consciousness  by  which  I  am 
actively  isolated  or  differentiated  from  all  other  men. 
If  my  divorce  from  God  were  real  or  objective  as 
well  as  conscious  or  subjective  —  if  it  were  a  fact 
of  physics  as  well  as  a  truth  of  metaphysics  —  then 
it  would  be  impossible  for  me  to  enjoy  a  vital  sen- 


INVETERATE   ENEMY  OF  GOD.  313 

sation;  for  I  have  not  the  presumption  to  suppose 
that  I  myself  constitute  my  sensitive  Ufe :  that  is, 
that  I  myself  contribute  ^a  particle  of  force  to  my 
seeing  or  hearing  or  smelling  or  tasting  or  touching 
faculty.  I  am  in  truth  as  passive  in  all  the  range 
of  my  sensuous  experience  as  the  child  is  in  partu- 
rition. That  is  to  say,  I  see,  hear,  smell,  taste,  touch, 
not  by  virtue  of  the  slightest  conceivable  exertion 
of  personal  power  on  my  part,  but  by  virtue  of  a 
marvellous  inherited  organization  which  fuses  in  itself 
the  two  conflicting  realms  of  a  wide  universality  and 
a  narrow  particularity,  and  thereby  renders  me  a 
conscious  person.  It  would  not  be  a  whit  less  silly 
accordingly  in  me  to  take  credit  to  myself  for  my 
physical  endowments,  than  it  would  be  in  a  child  to 
take  credit  to  itself  for  its  own  generation.  In  short 
my  finite  or  imperfect  personality  is  itself  a  sheer 
outbirth  and  dependency  of  an  organization  which 
combines  and  expresses  in  itself  the  grossest  univer- 
sality and  the  subtlest  individuality;  and  I  conse- 
quently realize  my  personality  as  finite  or  imperfect, 
only  because  I  am  persistently  blind  to  the  grandeur 
of  that  organization  as  a  universal  symbol,  or  look 
upon  it  solely  as  a  private  or  specific  and  not  as  a 
generic  or  race  possession. 

Understand,  then,  that  our  alienation  from  or  other- 
ness to  our  creator  is  not  the  least  a  demonstrable 


314  IS  OUR  NATURAL  ALIENATION  FROM 

fact  of  science,  implying  a  sensible  or  real  estrange- 
ment between  us.  On  the  contrary  it  is  a  strict 
truth  of  consciousness  —  a  fruit  of  our  purely  met- 
aphysical or  subjective  illusion  —  implying  on  our 
part  doubtless  a  certain  phenomenal  projection  from 
the  creator  whereby  we  become  5^^-constituted,  be- 
come personally  conscious,  but  arguing  no  particle 
of  essential  antagonism,  or  absolute  remoteness  be- 
tween us.  In  other  words  our  felt  finiteness  is  no 
way  a  law  of  our  spiritual  creation,  or  of  the  infinite 
and  eternal  being  we  possess  in  God,  but  only  and 
at  most  an  incident  of  our  natural  constitution,  or 
of  the  limited  and  transient  existence  we  possess  in 
rigid  community  with  all  other  men.  Thus,  all  I 
mean  to  say  is  that  the  finiting  principle  in  human 
life,  the  evil  principle,  is  invariably  that  of  selfhood 
or  private  personality;  while  the  infiniting  principle, 
the  good  principle  consequently,  is  invariably  that  of 
society,  or  the  broadest  possible  fellowship,  equality, 
brotherhood,  of  man  and  man.  And  creation  will 
never  be  spiritually  or  philosophically  appreciable  to 
us  until  we  take  to  heart  this  discrimination. 
~  As  well  as  I  can  remember,  in  fact,  the  spring  of 
all  my  intellectual  activity  in  the  past  was  to  know 
for  certain  whether  our  felt  finiteness  was  a  necessity 
of  our  spiritual  creation,  or  simply  an  incident  of  our 
natural  constitution :  whether,  for  example,  it  was  to 


GOD,   A  FACT  OF  SCIENCE?  315 

be  interpreted  as  having  been  arbitrarily  imposed 
upon  us  by  the  Divine  will,  or  as  inherent  merely  in 
the  sentiment  we  so  inordinately  cherish  of  personal 
independence.  For  in  the  former  case  my  hope  in 
God  necessarily  dies  out  by  the  practical  decease  of 
His  infinitude,  while  in  the  latter  case  it  is  not  only 
left  unimpaired  but  is  revived  and  invigorated.  If 
my  felt  finiteness  be  a  necessity  of  my  creatureship, 
that  is  to  say,  if  the  creative  perfection  necessitate 
the  creature's  imperfection  in  any  real  and  not  a 
simply  logical  sense;  then  clearly  the  creative  per- 
fection is  only  nominal,  not  real,  is  only  a  compara- 
tive, not  a  positive,  perfection :  and  a  creator  whose 
perfection  is  of  this  finite  sort  only,  may  be  worthy 
indeed  of  a  certain  respect  as  addressing  my  fear, 
but  is  so  far  from  attracting  my  adoring  hope  and 
love  as  to  be  much  more  likely  to  provoke  my  en- 
ergetic distrust  and  aversion.  But  if  on  the  other 
hand  my  felt  finiteness  be  a  mere  suggestion  or 
affirmation  of  the  natural  mind  in  me,  evidencing 
only  the  dense  ignorance  every  man  is  specifically 
under  with  respect  to  the  true  spirituality  of  his  na- 
ture, or  its  latent  divinity,  then  of  course  the  senti- 
ment I  cherish  of  the  creative  greatness  will  become 
so  much  the  more  aggrandized  and  expansive  as  I 
perceive  His  immortal  bounty  toward  us  to  suspend 
itself  not   upon  any   foolish   and   violent   castration, 


31'6  OR  IS  IT  A  TRUTH  OF  OUR 

SO  to  speak,  of  our  vain  and  flippant  and  conceited 
intelligence,  but  rather  upon  such  an  unlimited  im- 
pregnation of  its  ignorance  and  falsity  by  His  own 
wholesome  and  healing  truth  as  cannot  fail  in  the 
end  to  make  us  naturally  wise  with  His  infinite  and 
eternal  wisdom. 

Here,  in  fact,  was  the  veritable  secret  source  of 
all  my  intellectual  unrest.  During  all  my  early  in- 
tellectual existence  I  was  haunted  by  so  keen  a 
sense  of  God's  natural  incongruity  with  me  —  of  his 
natural  and  therefore  invincible  alienation,  otherness, 
externality,  distance,  remoteness  to  me  —  as  to 
breed  in  my  bosom  oftentimes  a  wholly  unspeakable 
heartsickness  or  homesickness.  The  sentiment  to  be 
sure  masked  its  ineffable  malignity  from  my  per- 
ception under  the  guise  of  an  alleged  5^/^ernatural 
limitation  on  God's  part ;  but  it  none  the  less  filled 
my  soul  with  the  tremor  and  pallor  of  death.  I 
have  no  doubt  indeed  that  if  it  had  not  been  for 
my  excessive  "  animal  spirits "  as  we  say,  or  the 
extreme  good-will  I  felt  towards  sensuous  pleasure 
of  every  sort,  which  alternated  my  morbid  conscien- 
tiousness and  foiled  its  corrosive  force,  I  should  have 
turned  out  a  flagrant  case  of  arrested  intellectual 
development.  I  could  have  borne  very  well,  mind 
you,  a  conviction  of  God's  personal  antipathy  to  me 
carried  to  any  pitch  you  please  \  for  my  person  does 


PERSONAL  CONSCIOUSNESS  MERELY?  317 

not  go  with  my  nature  as  man,  and  a  personal  con- 
demnation therefore  which  should  not  cut  me  off 
from  a  natural  resurrection,  would  not  deprive  me 
of  hope  toward  God.  But  my  conviction  of  God's 
personal  alienation  had  been  hopelessly  saddled, 
through  the  incompetency  of  my  theologic  sponsors, 
with  the  senseless  tradition  of  His  inveterate  es- 
trangement also  from  human  nature.  Thus  unhap- 
pily although  my  person  did  not  go  with  human 
nature  they  made  human  nature  to  go  with  my 
person,  or  managed  so  perfectly  to  confound  the  two 
things  to  my  unpractised  sense,  that  whenever  I  felt 
a  superficial  or  intrinsically  evanescent  pang  of  mere 
personal  remorse,  it  was  sure  to  pass  by  a  quick  dia- 
bolical chemistry  into  a  sense  of  the  deadliest  natural 
hostility  between  me  and  the  soiu'ce  of  my  life. 

It  is  in  fact  this  venomous  tradition  of  a  natural 
as  well  as  a  personal  disproportion  between  man  and 
his  maker  —  speciously  cloaked  as  it  is  under  the 
ascription  of  a  5?^ernatural  being  and  existence  to 
God  —  that  alone  gives  its  intolerable  odium  and 
poignancy  to  men's  otherwise  healthful  and  restora- 
tive conscience  of  sin.  That  man's  personality  should 
utterly  alienate  him  from  God  —  that  is  to  say,  make 
him  infinitely  other  and  opposite  to  God  —  this  I 
grant  you  with  all  my  heart,  since  if  God  were  the 
least  like  me  personally  all  my  hope  in  Ilim  would 


318  OUR  INHERITED  THEOLOGY 

perish.  Nothing  indeed  can  be  more  welcome  to 
me  than  that  impartial  truth,  for  all  my  chances  either 
of  present  happiness  or  future  blessedness  appear  to 
me  rigidly  conditioned  upon  it.  But  that  God  should 
be  also  an  infinitely  alien  substance  to  me  —  an  infi- 
nitely other  or  foreign  nature  —  this  wounds  my 
spontaneous  faith  in  Him  to  its  core,  or  leaves  it  a 
mere  mercenary  and  servile  homage.  I  perfectly 
understand  how  He  should  disown  all  private  or 
personal  relation  to  me,  because  personally  I  am 
anything  but  innocent,  being  to  all  the  extent  of  my 
personal  pretension  —  to  all  the  extent  of  my  dis- 
tinctively personal  interests  and  ambitions  —  the  im- 
passioned foe  and  rival  of  universal  man.  This  is 
one  thing.  But  it  is  quite  a  diffbrent  and  most 
odious  thing  that  He  should  feel  an  envenomed 
animosity  also  to  my  innocent  nature,  or  what  binds 
me  in  indissoluble  unity  with  every  man  of  woman 
born.  It  is  blasphemy  indeed  to  conceive  or  enter- 
tain such  a  thought,  for  it  makes  God  a  wantonly 
inhuman  being,  unworthy  the  homage  of  every  man 
who  reverences  his  own  nature,  or  is  not  spiritually 
a  sot.  I  can  only  repeat  accordingly  that  our  in- 
herited theology  must  infallibly  have  ended  by  suf- 
focating me  in  my  intellectual  swaddling-clothes,  had 
not  my  heart  been  providentially  inspired  by  the 
many  sensible  tokens  I  enjoyed  of  God's  vital  presence 


SOTTISH  AND  SUFFOCATING,  319 

in  GUI'  nature,  even  while  undergoing  the  utmost  per- 
sonal mortification  and  abasement  at  His  hands,  to 
reject  the  falsities  which  a  perverse  education  had 
temporarily  imposed  upon  it. 

Can  you  wonder  then  that  with  this  intellectual 
experience  on  my  part,  and  holding  these  convictions, 
I  cleave  for  very  life  to  the  truth  of  God's  Tiatural 
humanity  ?  I  do  not  say,  mind  you,  the  truth  of  His 
spiritual  or  essential  manhood :  for,  as  I  have  already 
said,  that  is  a  truth  which  no  unsophisticated  mind 
that  acknowledges  the  Divine  existence  at  all  can 
help  acknowledging :  but  of  His  natural,  adventitious, 
or  acquired  manhood,  a  manhood  which  is  forced 
upon  Him,  so  to  speak,  by  that  constitutional  limita- 
tion of  the  created  consciousness  to  which  men  give 
the  name  of  proprium  in  Latin,  of  selfhood,  freedom, 
and  so  forth,  in  the  vernacular.  The  Divine  celestial 
and  spiritual  manhood,  according  to  Swedenborg,  is 
that  which  exists  in  the  heavens,  and  constitutes  the 
heavens ;  being  the  reality  of  that  goodness  and  truth 
in  which  good  spirits  and  angels  are  principled,  and 
of  which  they  are  appearances,  consequently,  and 
nothing  but  appearances.  But  the  natural  sphere  of 
the  mind  is  a  universal  sphere,  embracing  the  hells  as 
well  as  the  heavens,  and  the  Divine  natural  human- 
ity, accordingly,  is  a  far  more  comprehensive  truth 
than  the  Divine  spiritual  humanity,  meeting  the  needs 


320  THE  DIVINE  NATURAL  HUMANITY 

of  diabolical  existences  no  less  than  those  of  angelic, 
and  guaranteeing  therefore  a  permanent  order  of  hu- 
man life  on  the  earth  which  all  the  wit  of  man  has 
been  unable  to  forecast.  The  miracle  of  this  order 
is  that  being  natural  it  is  spontaneous,  and  will 
accordingly  dispense  erelong  with  that  indolent  and 
imbecile  array  of  merely  professional  or  reflected  life 
which  constitutes  the  existing  civilized  order  of  the 
world,  and  hides  the  great  body  of  humanity  from 
the  enjoyment  of  the  common  sun  and  air.*  But 
you  don't  want  prophecy,  you  want  light.  This  how- 
ever is  a  demand  that  you  can  expect  me  to  supply 
only  in  very  limited  form  and  measure  ;  but  the  bare 
attempt  on  my  part  to  supply  it  will,  I  hope,  evince 
my  abundant  good-will  towards  you  in  the  premises. 
The  creative  love,  because  it  is  infinite  or  knows  no 


*  It  is  curious,  in  fact,  how  blindly  content  the  most  respectable 
life  of  the  world  is  to  identify  itself  with  "  professing "  or  seeming 
to  do,  instead  of  practice  or  really  doing.  The  physician  does  not  teach 
men  how  to  live  in  harmony  with  physical  laws,  but  only  "  professes  " 
to  do  so.  The  lawyer  does  not  teach  men  how  to  live  in  harmony  with 
moral  laws,  but  only  "professes"  to  do  so.  The  clergyman  does  not 
teach  men  how  to  live  in  harmony  with  Divine  laws,  but  only  "  pro- 
fesses "  to  do  so.  And  yet  it  is  in  deference  to  the  interests  of  this 
sham  professional  life  of  the  world,  that  men  are  expected  to  forego  their 
most  veridical  instincts  of  a  really  Divine  life  latent  in  men,  and  indeed 
practically  acknowledge  the  great  God  himself  a  sham  rather  than  ques- 
tion its  vulgar  but  conventional  manners  and  customs. 


'  ALONE  WORTHY  OF  MEN'S  ACKNOWLEDGMENT.    321 

alloy  of  self-love,  abandons  itself  without  reserve  to 
whatsoever  is  not  itself,  to  whatsoever  is  most  dis- 
tinctly other  and  opposite  to  itself.  We  may  indeed 
call  this  the  law  of  the  creative  perfection,  the  neces- 
sity of  perfect  love  :  to  delight  in  communicating  it- 
self, or  making  itself  unstintedly  over,  to  whatsoever 
is  intrinsically  worthless  or  void  of  substance.  Our 
delight,  at  all  events,  is  not  of  this  disinterested  chaiv- 
acter.  Our  activity  craves  remuneration.  We  delight 
to  find  dLplenu7}i  of  existence  made  ready  to  our  hand. 
We  go  forth  with  joy  only  when  we  encounter  a  ful- 
ness of  life  and  energy  ;  because  feeling  ourselves 
inwardly  poor  and  needy  we  covet  the  most  abound- 
ing outward  satisfactions.  But  the  creative  love 
being  infinite  or  free  of  all  subjective  bias,  is  so  es- 
sentially exuberant  that  it  cannot  help  constituting 
itself  a  force  of  boundless  subjective  life,  a  force  of 
unitary  and  universal  selfhood,  in  others  created  from 
itself.  Its  essential  life  or  delight  is  to  find  void  and 
desolate  ground  whereinto  it  may  forever  inflow  and 
abide;  to  find  or  rather  invent  in  its  creature  so 
genuine  an  otherness  to  itself,  so  vivid  an  opposition 
or  oppugnancy  to  its  own  perfection,  that  it  may 
eternally  inflow  and  indwell  in  the  creature  as  in  its 
very  ^elf.  In  truth  and  of  necessity  the  creature  con- 
stitutes the  only  selfhood  known  to  the  creative  love ; 
for  the  latter  being  pm-ely  infinite  or  objective,  that  is, 


322  SELFHOOD  THE  NATUKAL  BIRTHMARK 

destitute  of  all  subjective  aims  or  quality,  it  is  of 
course  incapable  of  realizing  itself  save  in  what  is  not 
itself,  that  is,  in  its  creature.  Selfhood  then,  or  felt 
freedom  in  the  creature,  is  his  natural  birthmark,  or 
congenital  stigma,  without  which  he  would  be,  not 
creature,  but  creator. 

Manifestly  then  creation  imposes  a  certain  natural 
limitation  or  stigma  upon  the  creature  which  we  call 
selfhood,  and  which  requires  to  be  Divinely  rectified 
or  overcome  before  the  creature  can  be  worthy  of  his 
creator.  Creation,  I  say,  imposes  this  obligation  upon 
the  creatm'e  :  for  what  does  creation  mean  ?  It  means, 
briefly  but  fully  stated,  the  communication  of  the  crea- 
tor s  being  or  substance  to  the  creature.  But  now 
mark :  the  creator's  being  or  substance  is  not  mate- 
rial, physical,  outward,  it  is  exclusively  spiritual, 
metaphysical,  inward.  That  is  to  say,  it  is  altogether 
qualitative  not  quantitative,  being  identical  with  the 
creator  Himself,  therefore  infinite  as  devoid  of  space, 
and  eternal  as  devoid  of  time.  But  how  in  this  state 
of  things  shall  we  conceive  the  creator  creating  — 
that  is,  communicating  Himself  to  —  others,  unless 
these  others  be  made  to  feeNhemselves  first  of  all  void 
both  of  spiritual  being  (or  being  in  themselves),  and 
natural  existence  (that  is,  existence  in  their  race) ; 
unless  in  other  words  both  their  being  and  their 
existence  confess  themselves  purely  personal  or  con- 


OR  CONGENITAL  STIGMA  OF  THE  CREATURE  :    323 

scions,  purely  apparitional  or  phenomenal,  as  made  up 
of  space  and  time  ?  The  creature  in  literal  truth  can 
only  be  in  Imnself,  both  spiritually  and  naturally,  a 
purely  formal  or  supposititious  existence ;  and  the 
whole  gist  accordingly  of  the  creative  travail  with 
him  is  to  eviscerate  him  of  his  pretension  to  be  any- 
thing else  :  that  is,  his  pretension  to  constitute  in 
himself  his  own  being  or  substance. 

The  creatiu:'e  of  course  resists  the  Divine  teaching 
with  all  his  spiritual  vis  inertice.  New  even  to  exist- 
ence, and  utterly  ignorant  therefore  of  life,  he  fancies 
that  he  embraces  it  all  in  himself,  nor  ever  doubts 
that  he  weaves  from  out  that  gossamer  consciousness 
the  stupendous  realities  of  goodness  and  truth.  But 
this  consciousness  of  ours  —  this  feeling  we  have  of 
our  life  or  being  as  inherent  in  ourselves,  and  as  ab- 
solutely our  owm  therefore  —  is  in  truth  and  all  the 
while  a  bottomless  cheat  or  illusion,  unworthy  of  our 
slightest  care  or  affection.  And  to  suppose  accord- 
ingly that  selfhood,  however  relatively  cultivated, 
refined,  and  exalted  it  may  appear  to  our  own  eyes, 
is  the  true  end  of  our  creation,  is  the  stupidest  of 
absurdities.  It  exists  in  us  in  fact  only  as  a  most 
ignorant  misappropriation  of  the  creative  substance ; 
only  as  the  fruit  of  an  idiot  tale  told  us  by  our 
senses  (known  in  sacred  or  symbolic  speech  as  — 
the  serjjenf)  to  the  effect,  that  inasmuch  as  we  are  the 


324         AN  IMPLICATION,   NOT  AN  EXPLICATION 

subjects  of  organized  or  finite  knowledge  :  namely, 
the  knowledge  oi  good  limited  by  evil,  and  of  evil  lim- 
ited by  good :  we  must  be  therefore  like  God,  and 
partakers  of  His  infinitude.  It  is  in  other  words  a 
pure  misconception  and  offshoot  of  our  native  spiritual 
stupidity  and  immodesty  ;  and  the  best  word  we  can 
say  of  it  accordingly  is,  that  it  is  a  mere  constitutional 
implication,  and  therefore  by  no  means  a  living  ex- 
plication, of  the  great  mystery  of  the  spiritual  creation. 
For  God,  the  creator,  being  spiritual  or  infinite,  must 
be  inscrutable  to  outward,  material,  or  finite  appre- 
hension, and  can  only  become  known  to  the  creature 
therefore  in  so  far  as  He  Himself  manages  spiritually 
to  exist  or  go  forth  in  created  form.  Now  the  created 
form — in  order  that  it  may  fitly  symbolize  or  respond 
to  the  creative  being  or  substance  —  must  be  above 
all  things  a  unitary  form,  as  expressing  the  unity  of 
each  and  all  creatures.  But  this  unity  of  the  created 
form  is  not  an  arbitrary  or  base  outside  result  me- 
chanically imposed  upon  the  creature  by  the  creator. 
On  the  contrary  it  is  the  outgrowth  exclusively  of  the 
creature's  nature,  which  to  the  creature's  own  eyes 
seems  to  belong  only  to  himself,  or  possess  only  one 
element,  that  namely  of  individuality,  but  apart  from 
his  own  eyes  is  seen  to  belong  to  all  men  primarily, 
or  to  claim  the  much  more  important  element  of 
universality,  and  to   allow  the  individual  or  private 


or  THE  SPIRITUAL  CREATION:  325 

element  indeed  only  as  included  in  that.  The  cre- 
ated form,  consequently,  as  being  a  development  of 
the  creature's  nature,  is  a  strictly  regenerate  or  social 
form  :  that  is  to  say,  presupposes  a  most  bitter  expe- 
rience on  the  creature's  part  of  himself,  and  a  most 
toilsome  conflict  with  that  self:  an  experience  and 
conflict  through  which  he  is  finally  led  to  renounce 
his  cherished  personal  independence,  his  diabolic 
pride  of  individuality,  with  all  the  ungodly  lusts  bred 
of  it,  and  to  esteem  himself  henceforth  in  God's 
sight  and  with  all  his  heart  as  a  race  only,  or  Di- 
vinely natural  and  united  man.  Now  remember 
always,  that  this  regeneration  of  human  nature,  this 
bitter  experience  and  conflict  of  man  with  himself, 
is  confined  of  com-se  to  the  human  bosom,  has  no 
existence  out  of  consciousness,  or  reflects  itself  in 
space  and  time  only  as  space  and  time  are  themselves 
embraced  in  man's  finite  consciousness ;  and  that  so 
long  as  our  natural  regeneration  is  in  abeyance  or 
immature,  the  Divine  providence  is  obliged  to  deal 
with  men's  flimsy  and  fraudulent  consciousness,  their 
pretentious  private  selfhood  or  personality,  as  if  it 
were  a  most  vital  spiritual  reality,  and  not  alone  the 
intense  and  immeasurable  counterfeit  of  the  truth  it 
will  one  day  appear  to  itself  to  be. 

Thus  the  creative  power,  if  it  would  be  regarded  as 
real,  is  bound  above  all  things  else  to  avouch  or  ulti- 


326  A  DENSE  MASK  BEHIND  WHICH 

mate  itself  in  the  natural  form  of  the  creature,  a  form 
which  shall  be  past  all  dispute  the  creature's  own 
form,  and  not  the  creator's  merely  in  him,  because  it 
is  a  form  of  finite  or  imperfect  knowledge,  namely  :  a 
knowledge  of  good  in  evil  and  of  evil  in  good.  For 
until  the  creature  thus  veritably  appears  to  himself, 
he  can  have  no  inward  certainty  that  his  creator  is. 
As  long  as  the  creature  attributes  to  himself  the  least 
reality  inward  or  outward,  spiritual  or  natural,  he 
must  honestly  deny  the  creative  power.  That  power 
vindicates  its  existence  to  the  creature  past  all  dispute, 
only  by  avouching  itself  the  all  of  the  created  life 
both  inward  and  outward,  both  spiritual  and  natural : 
for  so  long  as  the  creature  is  left  a  particle  of  life  or 
being  in  lihnself,  he  is  honestly  bound  to  atheism. 
And  what  most  ideal  nonsense  it  is  to  think  and  talk 
of  the  omnipotent  God  leaving  us  free  to  acknowl- 
edge or  reject  Him  !  Or  imputing  to  us  forlorn  luna- 
tics of  time  and  space  a  sufficient  degree  of  reason 
wherewith  to  measure  our  rightful  dependence  or 
independence  upon  His  unknown  perfection  !  I  can 
conceive  of  some  intolerable  goose  of  a  man,  inflated 
past  all  bounds  of  sanity  by  a  conceit  of  his  own  per- 
sonal consequence,  posing  to  attract  or  compel  my 
homage.  But  the  great  and  sincere  creator  of  men, 
never  !  He  is  infinitely  free  from  such  posturing  and 
trickery.     He  has  no  finite  selfhood  or  personality  of 


GOD  EFFECTS  OUR  NATURAL  REDEMPTION:         327 

His  own  to  render  Him  frivolous  and  vain,  nor  any 
finite  memory  consequently  of  His  own  to  render 
Him  susceptible  to  our  praises  and  affronts.  He 
does  not  ask  us  therefore  to  take  His  creative  name 
for  granted,  and  stifle  any  reasonable  doubts  we  may 
feel  on  the  subject  in  an  unintelligent,  hypocritical 
faith,  for  He  makes  our  despised  and  degraded  nature 
the  miraculous  mother-substance  of  all  His  creative 
effects,  and  the  eternal  witness  accordingly  of  His 
creative  name.  Thus  He  is  at  once  our  spiritual 
being  and  our  natural  existence,  our  individual  sub- 
stance and  our  universal  form  :  the  sentiment  of  self- 
hood in  us,  or  our  personal  consciousness,  being  only 
the  dense  and  unsuspected  mask  under  which  He  con- 
ciliates our  instincts  of  freedom,  and  gradually  accom- 
modates the  great  truth  to  our  rational  recognition. 

Do  I  not  well,  then,  to  call  selfhood  or  personality 
a  stigma  or  limitation  of  the  created  nature  instead 
of  an  endowment  of  it?  It  infers  in  the  creature 
a  pm-ely  subjective  or  conscious  existence,  and  this 
style  of  existence  is  simply  lawless,  as  being  without 
any  sacred  tie  of  nature  or  race  unconsciously  to  con- 
trol it.  A  conscious  subject,  indeed,  without  any 
real  or  unconscious  object  to  control  him,  furnishes 
our  conception  of  the  devil.  And  if  therefore  we  per- 
sist in  referring  our  selfliood  or  personality  to  the 
direct  hand  of  God,  we  affiliate  the  devil  to  Him. 


328  A  MERE  GENERALIZED   FORM  OF 

That  selfhood  utterly  lacks  this  real  or  objective  and 
unconscious  worth,  seems  to  me  wholly  undeniable. 
For  by  the  hypothesis  of  creation,  which  stamps  the 
creator  the  all  of  life,  there  is  and  can  be  no  absolute 
other  than  He.  He  is  being  or  life  itself,  and  what- 
soever exists  consequently  exists  only  by  Him.  Evi- 
dently then  the  only  otherness  we  can  conceive  in  the 
creature  to  the  creator  as  bottoming  his  selfhood  or 
felt  freedom,  must  be  purely  phenomenal,  conscious, 
or  subjective,  without  a  grain  of  absolute  truth,  with- 
out a  fibre  of  outward  or  objective  reality.  We  can- 
not help  characterizing  our  felt  finiteness  accordingly 
—  that  is,  that  conscious  otherness  or  oppugnancy 
in  us  to  the  infinite  which  we  call  our  selves — as 
essentially  unreal :  which  means  purely  personal, 
phenomenal,  fallacious.  And  an  existence  of  this 
shadowy  sort  in  the  creature,  except  as  incidentally 
involved  in  some  higher  creative  end,  is  of  course  fatal 
to  our  acknowledgment  of  the  creative  perfection. 

But  we  have  not  the  least  right  to  regard  the  exist- 
ence in  question  as  created.  Our  only  obligation  to 
do  so  would  arise  from  our  considering  creation  to  be 
an  absolute  work  on  God's  part,  to  constitute  His 
proper  glory  in  short,  and  subserve  no  ulterior  spir- 
itual ends.  But  this  would  be  supremely  silly,  for 
although  God  creates  He  does  so  only  in  order  to 
redeem  or  make.     He  is  infinitely  more  than  a  loving 


MAN'S  NATURAL  CONTEARIETY  TO  GOD.  329 

or  passionate  creator ;  He  is  a  wise  and  faithful 
maker  or  redeemer  as  well.  It  is  in  fact,  as  we  have 
already  seen,  a  mere  scientific  or  rationalistic  concep- 
tion of  creation,  to  regard  it  as  a  simplistic  process 
or  one  of  natural  evolution  by  simple  generation.  It 
is  no  such  thing.  Human  nature,  humanity,  is  the 
fruit  not  of  an  orderly  evolution  of  the  world's  force, 
but  rather  of  a  stupendous  historic  revolution  where- 
by the  world's  force  is  converted  from  a  wholly  out- 
ward relation  to  man  to  a  wholly  inward  power  in 
his  own  bosom,  a  power  of  enlightened  affection  and 
obedient  thought.  Human  nature  is  the  fruit  of  no 
simple  or  generative  but  of  a  profoundly  composite 
or  regenerative  process,  implying  the  creature's  final 
or  natural  and  objective  evolution  only  by  means  of  a 
previous  complete  spiritual  immersion,  or  subjective 
involution,  of  the  creative  substance  in  created  person 
or  form,  and  its  subsequent  resurrection  or  emergence 
thence  in  a  new  or  Divine-Human  nature  fit  to  confer 
any  amount  of  objective  substance  or  formal  reality 
upon  the  creature.  The  scientific  or  rationalistic 
view  of  creation  which  no  doubt  served  a  good  pur- 
pose in  the  infancy  of  the  mind  strikes  one  now  as 
so  childish  and  inane,  that  one  no  longer  wonders  at 
the  horde  of  thoughtless  and  flippant  young  persons 
who  give  up  creation  altogether  as  an  impossible  con- 
ception, and  are  not  slow  even  to  avow  themselves 


330  IMPOSSIBLE  TO  BELIEVE  ANY  LONGER 

atheists  or  nihilists  :  exactly  as  if  the  Divine  existence 
and  power  were  truths  which  men  had  always  arrived 
at  by  reasoning  instead  of  revelation,  or  were  prob- 
lems which  addressed  themselves  primarily  not  to  the 
heart  but  to  the  understanding. 

But  it  is  perfectly  safe  to  say  that  the  religious 
instinct  in  men,  as  it  never  has  sought  or  accepted 
scientific  guidance  upon  religious  questions,  so  it 
never  will  seek  or  accept  it  in  the  future.  It  is  the 
inappeasable  craving  of  that  instinct  in  the  soul, 
whenever  it  comes  to  the  discernment  of  its  own 
spiritual  nature,  that  the  creative  perfection  prove 
above  all  things  of  an  active  quality ;  that  is,  that  the 
creator  not  only  he  in  Himself  of  an  infinite  and  eter- 
nal worth  or  majesty,  but  that  He  livingly  avouch 
such  transcendent  worth  and  majesty  by  some  im- 
mortal work  of  justice  or  righteousness  accomplished 
in  the  nature  of  His  creature,  which  shall  forever 
transfigure  that  nature  or  make  it  serve  as  an  all- 
sufficient  revelation  and  perpetual  memento  of  His 
otherwise  inscrutable  name.  We  none  of  us,  you 
know,  are  apt  to  have  anything  but  a  prudential  re- 
gard for  a  great  capitalist  merely,  or  a  man  buried 
up  to  his  head  and  ears  in  money ;  while  we  feel  a 
disinterested  respect  for  every  man  of  inventive  or 
productive  genius  whose  work  enhances  the  wealth 
of  the  race  or  enlarges  the  bonds  of  human  inter- 


IN  GOD'S  SUPEKNATTJ'RA-L  ATTRIBUTES.  331 

course.  Just  so  we  should  feel  no  respect  for  an 
idle  or  luxurious  deity,  a  deity  for  example  who 
though  himself  armed  with  all  might,  and  garlanded 
with  the  obsequious  homage  of  heaven,  could  yet 
be  content  to  see  his  earthly  creatures  wallowing  in 
natural  ignorance,  indigence,  and  infamy,  without 
even  for  a  moment  sacrificing  or  postponing  the  al- 
lurements of  his  voluptuous  indolence  to  their  effectual 
relief.  It  is  not  enough  to  say  that  we  should  feel 
no  sincere  respect  for  such  a  deity :  our  hearts  Avould 
prompt  us  indeed  to  abhor  his  unworthy  name,  and 
reverence  many  an  undistinguished  man  as  of  far 
diviner  credentials. 

But  it  is  high  time  to  close  this  unduly  long  letter, 
though  I  have  by  no  means  begun  to  exhaust  its 
superb  theme,  nor  can  ever  grow  tired  of  denouncing 
the  heathenish  superstitions  of  our  infidel  chm'ch  and 
state,  which  utterly  dehumanize  the  Divine  perfection, 
and  permanently  defecate  its  claims  to  our  homage,  by 
stupidly  representing  it  as  of  a  rigidly  si/j)erna,t\ira\ 
quality.  Even  the  literal  Christian  verity,  in  fact, 
binds  us  to  say  that  God's  spiritual  perfection  whether 
of  love  or  wisdom  finds  its  sole  permanent  purchase 
upon  our  regard  i?t  a  redemptive  work  lorought  hy 
Him  in  our  nature,  which  justifies  us  in  ascribing  to 
Him  henceforth  a  distinctly  natural  or  impersonal 
infinitude,  and  so  forever  rids  us  both  of  the  baleful 


332  GOD  A  PRACTICAL   POWER  ADEQUATE   TO 

intellectual  falsities  inherent  in  the  conception  of  His 
supernatural  personality,  and  of  the  enforced  per- 
sonal homage,  precatory  and  deprecatory,  engendered 
by  that  conception  in  the  sphere  of  our  sentimental 
piety.  The  principle  involved  in  this  dogmatic  trans- 
action is  that  of  the  hierarchical  subjection  of  passion 
to  action,  of  root  to  stem,  stem  to  flower,  and  flower 
to  fruit.  And  the  practical  lesson  to  be  derived  from 
it  is  that  God  is  not  willing  to  be  had  in  reverence  of 
men  for  His  absoluteness  and  infinity,  but  only  for 
His  relative  perfection  -.  in  that  being  rich  and  of  in- 
comparable renown  He  yet  makes  Himself  poor  and 
of  no  repute  that  we  through  His  destitution  may 
become  rich  and  powerful.  And  when  He  who  is  the 
acknowledged  top  of  all  perfection  —  the  crown  of 
every  excellency  which  the  foolish  heart  of  man  covets, 
the  excellency  of  will,  of  knowledge,  of  power  —  thus 
renounces  His  absoluteness,  renounces  every  patent- 
right  He  has  to  our  regard,  every  conceded  or  uncon- 
ditional advantage  borrowed  from  our  servile  tradi- 
tions, and  consents  like  any  unprivileged  person,  like 
any  honest  workingman,  diligently  to  sue  out  His  title 
to  our  allegiance  in  the  court  of  every  man's  equitable 
judgment,  it  is  high  time  for  us  to  learn  that  a  man 
is  in  the  long  run  only  so  much  as  he  does,  that  there 
is  no  such  thing  as  a  chronic  excellency  —  as  an  ab- 
solute or  fossil  perfection  —  ever  practicable  either  to 


ALL  MAN'S  NATURAL  (OR  IMPERSONAL)  NEEDS.    333 

man  or  God,  and  that  our  only  chance  therefore  for 
immortahty  hes  in  no  stored-up  capital  of  goodness 
and  truth  we  possess,  but  in  the  acute  life  or  charac- 
ter we  daily  witness  in  putting  all  our  accumulations 
of  goodness  and  truth  out  to  active  use. 

We  laugh,  as  I  said  awhile  ago,  at  an  inventor  who 
should  ask  us  to  take  his  genius  on  trust,  or  with- 
out any  evidence  of  its  reality.  And  there  can  be 
no  more  offensive  tribute  to  the  Divine  name  than  to 
show  Him  a  deference  we  deny  to  the  rankest  char- 
latan. How  infinitely  unworthy  of  God  it  would  be 
to  exact  or  expect  of  the  absolute  and  unintelligent 
creatures  of  His  power  a  belief  out  of  all  proportion 
to  their  sensible  knowledge,  or  unbacked  by  anything 
but  tradition  !  In  the  absence  of  sensible  knowledge 
tradition  is  no  doubt  the  next  best  thing  ;  but  that 
the  deputy  should  be  allowed  permanently  to  sup- 
plant its  principal  is  a  monstrous  absurdity.  I  am 
free  to  confess  for  my  own  part  that  I  have  no  belief 
in  God's  absolute  or  irrelative  and  unconditional  per- 
fection. I  have  not  the  least  sentiment  of  worship 
for  His  name,  the  least  sentiment  of  awe  or  reverence 
towards  Him,  considered  as  a  perfect  person  sufficient 
unto  Himself.  That  style  of  deity  exerts  no  attrac- 
tion either  upon  my  heart  or  understanding.  Any 
mother  who  suckles  her  babe  upon  her  own  breast, 
any  bitch  in  fact  who  litters  her  periodical  brood  of 


334       HE  NEVER  POSES  FOR  MEN'S  ADMIRATION. 

pups,  presents  to  my  imagination  a  vastly  nearer  and 
sweeter  Divine  charm.  What  do  I  care  for  a  good- 
ness which  boasts  of  a  hopeless  aloofness  from  my 
own  nature  —  except  to  hate  it  with  a  manly  inward 
hatred?  And  what  do  I  care  for  a  truth  which 
professes  to  be  eternally  incommunicable  to  its  own 
starving  progeny  —  but  to  avert  myself  from  it  with 
a  manly  outward  contempt  ?  Let  men  go  on  to  cher- 
ish under  whatever  name  of  virtue,  or  wisdom,  or 
power  they  will,  the  idol  of  Self-Sufficiency  :  I  for 
my  part  will  cherish  the  name  of  Him  alone  whose 
insufficiency  to  Himself  is  so  abject  that  He  is  inca- 
pable of  realizing  Himself  except  iii  others.  In  short 
I  neither  can  nor  will  spiritually  confess  any  deity 
who  is  not  essentially  human,  and  existentially  thence 
exclusively  natural,  that  is  to  say,  devoid  of  all  distinc- 
tively personal  or  limitary  pretensions. 


LETTER    XXIII. 


^^^2^^^-f  Y  DEAR  FRIEND  :  —  Doubtless  you  are 
able  to  discern  by  this  time  why  neither  my 
faith  nor  my  reason  is  at  all  disconcerted 
by  the  current  rationalistic  criticism  of  the 
gospels.  It  is  because  I  have  never  valued  the  gos- 
pels for  their  own  sake,  but  exclusively  for  the  revela- 
tion they  offer  of  the  Divine  name  in  connection  with 
man's  nature  and  history.  To  say :  that  a  certain 
man  was  born  of  a  virgin,  and  that  after  enduring  a 
life  of  great  ignominy  and  suffering  at  the  hands 
of  his  countrymen,  he  was  put  to  a  violent  and 
opprobrious  death,  from  which  however  after  three 
dayd  sepulture  he  rose  again,  and  presented  himself  i?i 
bona  fide  recognizable  form  to  his  amazed  disciples :  is 
clearly  anything  but  a  scientific  statement,  and  arrests 
men's  attention  only  because  it  appeals  to  a  grander 
and  more  universal  instinct  in  them  than  that  of 
science,  namely:  the  instinct  of  conscience,  or  the 
interests  of  their   immortal   life.     It  is   strictly  fair 


A   HIGHER   AND   LOWER  ORDER 


to  say,  moreover,  that  the  statement  never  purported 
itself  to  have  any  scientific  vahdity  except  in  the 
hands  of  unintelhgent  and  incompetent  partisans. 
It  was  originally  intended  to  furnish  a  purely  doc- 
trinal footing  to  men's  intellectual  and  spiritual  life, 
by  connecting  their  nature  with  God  in  the  highly 
exceptional  and  representative  personality  of  Christ. 
A  certain  obvious  antagonism  has  always  announced 
itself  between  religion  and  science,  growing  out  of 
the  circumstance  that  they  both  make  their  appeal 
to  the  human  intelligence,  but  one  to  a  higher  intel- 
ligence, the  other  to  a  lower :  the  only  dispute  being 
which  intelligence  is  the  higher,  that  represented  by 
science,  or  that  represented  by  faith.  Science  com- 
prises the  field  of  our  distinctively  finite  knowledge, 
while  religion  has  always  had  the  pretension  to  con- 
nect us  with  the  infinite.  There  ought  to  be  no 
contrariety  between  the  two  pursuits  in  themselves, 
any  more  than  there  is  contrariety  between  soul  and 
body;  for  the  interests  of  religion  are  emphatically 
and  exclusively  those  of  soul,  and  the  interests  of  sci- 
ence as  emphatically  and  exclusively  those  of  body. 
Their  only  apparent  quarrel  is  owing  to  the  existence 
of  foolish  adherents  and  advocates  on  either  side: 
many  men  of  science  being  narrow  enough  to  have  no 
broadly  human  sympathies,  and  therefore  very  apt  to 
grow  indignant  at  having  their  chosen  pursuit  charac- 


OF  KNOWLEDGE  IN  MAN.  337 

terized  as  a  low  order  of  knowledge  compared  with 
any  other  order;  and  religious  men  being,  as  a  gen- 
eral thing,  not  so  devoted  to  the  interests  of  spiritual 
truth,  primarily,  as  to  feel  reluctant  in  season  and  out 
of  season  to  press  this  humiliating  conviction  home 
upon  them. 

Distribute  the  blame  of  the  quarrel  where  you 
will,  however,  this  difference  of  a  higher  and  lower 
order  of  knowledge  in  man  does  unquestionably  at- 
tach to  the  relations  of  religion  or  philosophy  (for 
the  two  things  are  sufficiently  near  to  be  regarded 
for  our  present  purpose  as  almost  identical)  and  sci- 
ence :  religion  being  concerned  with  man's  direct 
relations  to  God,  and  science  with  his  indirect  ones. 
Science  admits  no  conclusion  within  her  own  sphere 
which  is  not  verifiable  by  sense.  And  religion  in 
her  sphere  disowns  and  distrusts  every  conclusion  not 
distinctly  and  persistently /x/^z/?^*^  by  sense.  Surely 
a  difference  more  vital  or  practical  than  this,  can 
scarcely  be  imagined;  and  there  can  be  no  more 
fatal  folly  with  reference  to  man's  intellectual  in- 
terests, than  to  make  hght  of  it.  On  one  side  we 
have  the  human  soul,  and  the  spiritual  world,  which 
is  the  soul's  "  real  habitation  and  native  country,"  as 
Swedenborg  finely  phrases  it.  On  the  other,  we  have 
the  human  body,  and  the  material  world,  which  at 
most  is  that  body's  temporary  dwelling-place.     The 


338  SCIENCE  SELF-DISQUALIFIED 

difference  between  these  realms  is  vast  to  be  sure, 
unimaginably  vast :  but  there  is  no  fibre  of  conflict 
between  them,  save  what  is  borrowed  on  one  side  or 
the  other  from  men's  ignorance  and  perversity.  If 
men  of  science  are  content  to  consider  man's  phenom- 
enal existence  his  true  life  or  being,  because  it  is 
the  only  life  or  being  in  him  which  reports  itself  to 
sense,  I  do  not  see  what  right  religious  men  have 
to  complain  :  they  surely  are  7iot  compelled  to  think  as 
men  of  science  think.  And  if  religious  men  in  their 
turn  are  content  to  consider  man's  highest  life  or 
being  made  up  of  his  relations  to  any  person  or  per- 
sons outside  the  pale  of  human  nature,  I  don't  see 
what  right  men  of  science  have  to  complain :  they 
surely  are  not  compelled  to  believe  as  the  men  of  faith 
do.  For  neither  side  has  any  just  claim  to  the  mo- 
nopoly of  error ;  and  each  therefore  should  diligently 
refrain  from  pressing  his  own  characteristic  nonsense 
upon  the  respect  of  the  other. 

The  weakness  of  scientific  men,  as  I  have  shown 
in  former  letters,  consists  in  their  attempting  to  phi- 
losophize upon  strictly  scientific  data.  The  funda- 
mental postulate  of  science  is  that  all  known  existence 
is  conditioned  in  space  and  time,  and  all  her  distinc- 
tive achievements  imply  the  truth  of  that  postulate. 
But  when  one  seeks  to  get  no  longer  a  scientific, 
but  a   purely  philosophic,  result   from   that   barren 


AS  A  RESEARCH  OF  BEING.  339 

premiss,  his  labor  necessarily  turns  out  negative  and 
fruitless,  because  it  proceeds  upon  a  mere  unrighteous 
confounding  of  being  with  existence.  Of  course  phi- 
losophy has  no  objection  to  admit  with  science  that 
all  known  existence  is  conditioned  in  space  and  time. 
It  only  denies  that  the  unknown  being  from  which 
this  known  existence  is  derived,  and  of  which  it  is 
a  manifestation,  is  itself  so  conditioned;  and  conse- 
quently it  affirms  that  any  philosophic  research,  or 
research  of  being  infinite  and  eternal,  conducted  upon 
the  mere  data  of  existence,  or  space  and  time  princi- 
ples, can  have  no  other  than  a  negative  and  sceptical 
result.  In  other  words :  philosophy  maintains  that 
our  time  and  space  knowledge,  or  the  estimate  we 
put  upon  finite  existence,  is  the  exact  measure  of  our 
ignorance  of  true  being :  and  so  disqualifies  science 
as  a  philosophic  discipline  from  the  start.  And  man- 
ifestly the  only  effectual  thing  that  science  can  do 
in  rebuttal  of  this  criticism  is  in  its  turn  to  invali- 
date the  peculiar  notion  of  religion  or  philosophy  in 
regard  to  man's  true  life  or  being.  And  this  it  has 
never  yet  attempted  to  do,  for  Swedenborg  is  the  only 
man  in  the  intellectual  history  of  the  race  that  has 
ever  intelligently  formulated  the  axioms  of  religion 
or  philosophy  in  regard  to  man's  true  life  or  being : 
and  scientific  men  not  only,  but  even  our  soi-disant 
philosophers  as  well,  who  are,  the  bulk  of  them,  mere 


340  THE  SPIRITUAL  BEING  OF  THINGS 

unaffiliated  bantlings  of  science,  are  in  the  habit 
of  practically  ignoring  Swedenborg's  labors,  for  the 
cheap  and  easy  reason  that  any  man  who  claims  an 
insight  of  the  spiritual  or  living  world,  is  ijjso  facto 
a  self-pronounced  lunatic. 

The  being  of  things,  according  to  philosophy,  is 
never  constituted  by  their  existence,  for  in  order  that 
things  should  be  able  to  exist,  or  go  forth  in  sensible 
or  phenomenal  form,  that  is,  their  own  form,  they 
must  first  have  being  in  their  creator ;  and  it  is  worse 
than  idle,  accordingly,  it  is  misleading,  in  science  to 
attempt  accounting  for  the  being  of  things  by  alleging 
the  laws  or  conditions  of  their  visible  existence.  This 
is  both  unscientific  and  unphilosophic.  In  the  first 
place  the  laws  of  existence  are  never  used  by  scientific 
men  to  express  what  originates  or  creates  existence, 
by  giving  it  life  or  soul;  but  only  to  express  what 
constitutes  existence,  by  giving  it  body.  And  in  the 
second  place  the  being  of  things  to  philosophy  never 
falls  outside  the  things  themselves,  or  in  nature,  but 
is  ahvays  intensely  inward  and  spiritual.  Thus  the 
Christian  religion  would  grossly  violate  philosophy 
and  science  both,  if  it  attempted  to  make  the  being 
of  men  convertible  with  their  base  natural  existence ; 
but  it  actually  offends  neither  of  them,  and  on  the 
contrary  accords  with  them  both,  by  making  it  iden- 
tical with  Divine  or  creative  Love.     For  God,  the 


DISTINCT  FROM  THEIR  NATURAL  EXISTENCE.      341 

creator  of  man,  it  says,  is  Love :  and  we  men,  His 
creatures,  must  be  in  ourselves  —  not  love  of  course, 
because  this  would  be  to  make  creatm'e  creator  —  but 
only  forms,  phenomena,  appearances,  images,  of  love. 
That  is,  our  fundamental  natural  quality,  or  distinc- 
tive human  identity,  must  be  constituted  of  affection, 
and  of  thought  thence  derived ;  and  only  to  a  super- 
ficial or  fatuous  regard  will  it  seem  to  affiliate  itself 
to  the  elements  of  space  and  time. 

Now  it  is  essential  to  our  conception  of  Divine  and 
creative  Love,  that  it  be  perfect  or  infinite.  And 
perfect  or  infinite  love  is  altogether  objectively,  not 
subjectively,  constituted.  That  is  to  say,  it  is  only 
what  it  does ;  or  reveals  itself  to  us  only  by  repro- 
ducing its  potencies  and  felicities  in  others,  createa 
from  itself.  It  is  not  subjectively  cognizable,  or  self- 
cognizable:  for  if  it  were  thus  cognizable — cognizable 
in  itself — it  would  be  differentially  related  to  other 
being  than  itself,  and  hence  confess  itself  uncreative 
and  finite.  In  short  it  must  essentially  be,  and  phe- 
nomenally exist,  only  in  communicating  its  being  and 
existence  to  others,  so  endowing  them  with  its  own 
infinitude  or  perfection.  Such  is  our  inevitable  con- 
ception of  Divine  or  creative  Love,  as  being  infinite 
or  perfect. 

But  now  observe.  It  follows  from  this  conception 
of  creative  Love,  that  its  creatures,  in  order  to  avouch 


342  WE  ACHIEVE  THE  LOVE  OF  OUR  KIND 

their  dependence  upon  it,  or  prove  themselves  proper 
and  adequate  phenomenal  types,  forms,  or  images  of 
it,  should  as  such  typical  forms  or  images  be  objec- 
tively rather  than  subjectively  pronounced:  that  is, 
should  be  primarily  forms  of  use  to  others,  and  only 
subordinately  to  such  use  forms  of  life  or  delight  in 
themselves.  In  other  words :  it  is  a  law  of  all  cre- 
ated existence  —  such  is  the  dazzling  perfection  or 
infinitude  of  its  creator !  —  that  it  realize  its  pecul- 
iar potencies  and  felicities  only  in  loving  what  is  not 
itself,  or  more  briefly  still,  in  unloving  itself.  For  it 
is  obvious  that  the  creature  of  an  infinite  power  cannot 
realize  life  in  an  absolute  or  infinite  manner :  that  is, 
by  loving  others  without  unloving  himself;  simply 
because  a  potency  of  this  sort  in  the  creature  would 
argue  him  to  be  uncreated,  or  identify  him  with  the 
creator,  making  him  also  to  be  infinite  Love.  And 
if  he  cannot  love  in  an  infinite  or  absolute  manner, 
he  can  only  do  so  in  a  finite,  contingent,  or  relative 
manner,  that  is,  by  ceasing  to  love  himself.  For  you 
must  in  the  interest  of  philosophy  perfectly  under- 
stand that  the  only  principle  of  evil  in  God's  universe, 
—  or  what  is  equivalent,  the  only  thing  that  separates 
between  creature  and  creator  —  is  the  selfliood  or 
identity  of  the  creature :  *  so  that  there  would  have 
been  no  other  way  possible  to  the  creative  Love  of 

*  See  Appendix  B. 


ONLY  BY  PRACTICALLY  UNLOVING  SELF.         343 

avoiding  the  existing  evil  of  the  universe  but  by  void- 
ing the  creature's  personal  identity,  or  leaving  him 
without  natural  selfhood :  thus  without  the  remot- 
est possibility  of  spiritual  conjunction  with  God :  in 
short,  both  literally  and  spiritually  uncreated.  Thus 
in  loving  myself  supremely,  or  in  prizing  above  all 
things  else  the  interests  of  my  personal  identity,  I 
spiritually  separate  myself  from  God,  and  all  the  true 
and  living  and  lovely  things  the  Divine  name  stands 
for  in  the  creature ;  for  in  so  doing  I  make  my  bosom 
the  very  fons  et  origo  malorum,  and  consequently  fill 
my  daily  life  with  a  spirit  of  hatred  and  intolerance 
towards  all  other  men.  Accordingly  it  is  only  by 
contriving  to  utAq^q  myself  that  I  can  effectually  do 
my  part  in  the  extinction  of  the  hells  bound  up  in 
my  nature,  or  ever  practically  succeed  like  Jesus 
Christ  in  loving  my  fellow-men. 

We  are  now  in  a  position  to  understand  what 
Swedenborg  says  of  the  tendency  of  creative  order 
to  ultimate  itself,  or  descend  to  extremes,  in  the 
nature  of  the  creature.  "By  creation  is  signified 
what  is  Divine  inwardly  and  outwardly,  or  in  first 
things  and  last:  for  everything  created  by  God  has 
its  beginning  in  Him,  and  from  that  beginning  pro- 
ceeds according  to  order  even  to  the  ultimate  end, 
thus  through  the  heavens  into  the  world,  and  there 
rests  as  in  its  ultimate,  for  the  ultimate  of  Divine  order 


344  SPIRITUAL  CREATION   UNREAL 

is  realized  in  mundane  nature" *  "  The  ultimate  of 
Divine  order  is  in  Man ;  and  because  man  is  the 
ultimate  of  Divine  order  he  is  also  its  basis  or  foun- 
dation. Since  the  Lord's  influx  does  not  stop  in  the 
middle,  but  proceeds  to  its  ultimates,  as  was  just 
said;  since  this  middle  through  which  the  influx 
passes  is  the  angelic  heaven,  and  the  ultimate  to 
which  it  tends  is  man  or  the  human  race ;  and  since 
nothing  independent  or  disconnected  with  other  things 
can  exist :  it  follows  that  heaven  and  the  human  race 
are  so  intimately  conjoined  that  each  subsists  by  the 
other.  So  that  the  human  race  without  heaven  would 
be  like  a  chain  which  had-  lost  a  link,  and  heaven 
without  the  human  race  would  be  like  a  house  with- 
out a  foundation."  f  "  Divine  order  never  stops  in 
an  intermediate  point "  (as  the  angel  or  heaven)  "  and 
there  forms  a  thing  without  its  ultimate,  for  then  it 
would  not  have  perfectly  expressed  itself:  but  goes 
straight  on  to  its  ultimate  and  when  there  it  begins 
formation,  and  also  by  mediums  there  brought  to- 
gether it  redintegrates  itself,  and  produces  ulterior 
things  by  procreations  :  whence  the  ultimate  is  called 
the  seminary  or  seed-place  of  heaven."  |  And  so  on. 
What  now  is  the  plain  meaning  of  these  and  a 
thousand  similar  passages  ? 

*  Swedenborg's  Arcana,  10634.  %  Ibid.  315. 

f  Heaven  and  Hell,  304. 


UNLESS  BASED  IN  THE  CREATED  NATURE.        345 

They  express  to  my  judgment  the  purpose  of  the 
creative  wisdom  to  make  its  work  thoroughly  real  to 
the  understanding  of  the  creature,  by  giving  it  a  fixed 
or  stable  anchorage  in  his  natm'e,  or  absolutely  weld- 
ing it  to  his  self-consciousness.  It  is  idle  to  suppose 
that  a  creature  can  ever  come  to  consciousness,  or 
what  is  the  same  thing,  can  ever  realize  life,  or  even 
existence,  save  upon  a  natural  basis.  For  his  nature 
as  a  creature  cuts  him  off  from  life  or  being  in 
himself,  and  stamps  him  utterly  dependent  for  all 
his  subjective  experience  upon  a  life  or  being  in- 
finitely remote  from  himself — viz.  his  creator.  And 
unless  therefore  his  very  nature  as  thus  subjectively 
imbecile  and  impotent  be  creatively  organized,  he 
can  never  come  to  self-consciousness,  much  less 
to  any  of  the  providential  spiritual  issues  of  such 
consciousness.*  His  nature  as  a  creature  is  his  sole 
reality  in  time  or  eternity,  and  unless  he  be  en- 
dowed with  natural  reality  therefore,  he  must  forfeit 
his  chances  both  of  spiritual  and  personal,  or  of  real 

*  There  is  and  can  be  no  such  thing  in  the  universe  as  an  unrelated 
or  disconnected  existence,  and  Swedcnborg  is  perfectly  philosophical  in 
denouncing  such  a  pretension.  Indeed,  if  it  were  otherwise,  the  natural 
or  universal  element  would  be  wholly  lacking  to  our  sentient  experience. 
That  is  to  say,  there  would  be  no  nature  and  no  universe,  but  the  entire 
realm  of  existence  would  dwindle  into  a  logical  poliverse,  every  forlorn 
and  disastrous  fragment  of  it  fatally  bumping  the  head  of  every  other,  or 
nullifying  instead  of  adding  to  the  sum  of  the  other's  well-being. 


346        IMPLICATION  OF  THE  CREATURE'S  NATURE 

and  seeming,  life  forever.  His  nature  is  abundantly 
real  by  virtue  of  its  implicit  logical  contrariety  to 
that  of  the  creator ;  and  all  his  own  reality,  which 
he  ignorantly  and  foolishly  supposes  to  inhere  in  his 
conscious  self,  derives  exclusively  from  it.  So  that 
provided  only  the  creator's  resources  be  actually  great 
enough  to  vivify  the  creature's  nature,  and  there- 
by avouch  His  own  spiritual  infinitude  in  mak- 
ing the  creature's  intrinsic  evil  the  eterna,l  witness 
of  His  power,  creation  will  always  have  a  fixed  or 
stable  basis  of  reality  to  the  creature's  imagination, 
and  in  that  seciu-e  anchorage  the  creative  wisdom 
may  ever  after  freely  work  out  whatever  proper  and 
perfect  spiritual  issues  its  own  infinite  love  may  in- 
wardly inspire. 

To  say,  then,  that  creative  order  never  halts  in  an 
intermediate  spiritual  plane,  as  heaven  or  the  angel, 
but  goes  straight  on  to  its  natural  ultimate,  or  resting- 
place,  in  the  world  or  man,  and  there  redintegrates 
itself,  or  gathers  itself  up  anew,  for  spiritual  procrea- 
tion :  is  simply  to  say  in  other  words  that  creative 
order  is  not  the  wilful,  arbitrary,  unreal  thing  it  is 
generally  thought  among  men  to  be,  as  based  upon 
the  sovereign  license  of  the  creator,  but  is  a  most 
tender,  reasonable,  and  real  thing,  as  based  in  the 
creature's  own  nature,  which  alone  accordingly  makes 
it  obligatory  upon  him  to  observe  it. 


IN  CREATION,   ALONE  MAKES  IT  REAL.  347 

Let  US  now  repeat  the  substance  of  what  we  have 
just  said,  in  order  the  better  to  impress  it  on  our 
inteUigence. 

The  intellectual  secret  of  creation,  then,  very  briefly 
stated,  is  that  the  creator  is  bound  by  His  own  per- 
fection —  in  order  to  give  His  creature  spiritual  or 
immortal  conjunction  with  Himself  —  first  of  all  to 
endow  him  with  natural  reality,  or  conscious  projec- 
tion to  himself;  and  then  spiritually  to  vivify  this 
natural  consciousness  of  his  by  giving  it  social  form 
or  quality :  so  enabling  the  creature  to  slough  off,  of 
himself  as  it  were,  the  selfish  and  monstrous  growths 
which  have  signalized  his  natural  immatiu-ity. 

And  now  if  these  things  be  true  we  see  at  once 
how  crudely  literal  —  that  is  to  say,  how  thoroughly 
destitute  of  living  or  spiritual  truth  —  the  current 
ecclesiastical  conceptions  of  creative  order  are.  In- 
deed the  word  "  order  "  is  totally  inapplicable  to  the 
ordinary  church  dogma  of  creation,  as  this  dogma 
makes  it  a  mere  brute  work  of  omnipotence,  result- 
ing in  the  production  of  outward  Nature,  or  the  end- 
less chaos  of  mineral,  vegetable,  and  animal  existence. 
It  is  a  creation  in  other  words  with  neither  beginning, 
nor  middle,  nor  end,  and  so  is  exquisitely  unadapted 
to  rational  recognition.  As  Swedenborg  describes 
creation  on  the  other  hand,  it  is  a  house  of  three 
stories  or  degrees ;  the  highest  or  inmost  degree  cor- 


348  SWEDENBORG  DESCRIBES  CREATION 

responding  to  the  private  or  bedroom  floor  of  om- 
houses,  in  which  the  inmate  dwells  secure  from  all 
intrusion  ;  the  second  or  midmost  degree  correspond- 
ing to  the  public  or  drawing  room  floor  of  modern 
houses,  in  which  the  inmate  receives  and  entertains 
his  friends ;  and  the  first  or  lowest  story  correspond- 
ing to  the  basement  or  kitchen  floor  of  our  houses,  in 
which  the  merely  animal  or  material  needs  of  the  in- 
mates are  provided  for :  and  he  names  these  succes- 
sive stories,  accordingly,  the  first :  Natural ;  the  sec- 
ond :  Spiritual ;  the  third  :  Celestial.  But  the  church 
dogma  makes  creation  a  house  of  one  story  only,  and 
that  story  the  lowest,  or  basement ;  so  that  he  who 
follows  ecclesiastical  guidance,  is  left  without  intel- 
lectual growth,  and  is  kept  consequently  in  the  dark 
as  to  the  future  fortunes  of  his  race,  and  of  himself, 
both  alike.  Indeed  the  religionist  by  profession  has 
no  right  to  know  whether  the  daemonic  object  of 
his  worship  —  being  totally  unidentified  as  he  puta- 
tively  is  by  the  assumption  of  his  creature's  nature 
—  may  not  leave  the  latter  at  any  moment  in  the 
lurch,  with  every  tender  yearning  of  his  heart  after 
good  forever  unsatisfied,  as  now,  and  every  restless 
desire  of  his  intellect  after  truth  turned  to  rayless 
night. 

But  I  concede  too  much  to  the  church  in  saying 
that  it  makes    creation   a  work  of  "  omnipotence." 


AS  A  HOUSE  OF  THREE  STORIES.  349 

For  omnipotence  being  Divine  is  not  recognizable  by 
sense,  and  creation  as  the  church  understands  it  per- 
tains wholly  to  the  sphere  of  sense.  Omnipotence  is 
recognizable  only  by  man's  rational  mind,  and  in  order 
to  be  so  recognized,  must  avouch  itself  in  a  work  of 
infinite  love  carried  out  by  infinite  wisdom  to  a  result 
of  infinite  practical  benignity.  Accordingly  wherever 
man's  rational  mind  recognizes  a  work  of  this  com- 
plex  infinitude  or  perfection,  there  and  there  alone  it 
sees  revealed  to  its  adoring  recognition  the  omnipo- 
tent creator,  and  on  bended  knees  gives  Him  the  name 
of  Jehovah  God  forever.  It  is  sheer  folly  to  make  the 
senses  a  standard  of  judgment  in  relation  to  omnipo- 
tence or  anything  else  Divine  ;  because  the  senses  are 
finite  or  organic  and  discern  appearances  only,  while 
Divine  things  are  infinite  and  inorganic,  that  is,  the 
exact  inversion  of  whatsoever  finitely  exists,  or  sensi- 
bly appears  to  be. 

But  the  professional  church,  heeding  the  bare  let- 
ter of  revelation  only,  that  is,  restricting  its  intellect- 
ual interests  to  the  domain  of  fact  exclusively,  puts 
itself  out  of  all  sympathetic  relation  to  man's  nascent 
and  kindling  spiritual  intelligence,  and  proves  itself 
in  every  point  of  view  a  mere  cumbcrcr  of  the  ground 
which  it  was  appointed  to  cultivate.  For  example : 
all  the  active  intellect  of  the  church  at  present  is  ex- 
pended in  the  defence  of  miracles,  as  if  God's  honor 


350  MIRACLE  A  SENSUOUS  SYMBOL 

were  specially  imperilled  by  the  current  scientific 
scepticism  on  that  subject.  But  scientific  men  sim- 
ply declare  that  miracle  is  contrary  to  the  observed 
course  of  nature,  and  that  however  men  may  have 
been  content  to  believe  in  it  in  times  past,  they  are 
no  longer  able  to  do  so  ;  churchmen  themselves,  if  the 
question  were  put  to  the  test,  being  no  more  able  to 
do  so  than  any  other  people.  And  it  is  evident  that 
the  chm-ch  can  say  nothing  to  the  purpose  in  reply 
to  this  criticism.  And  this  simply  because  it  is  so 
habitually  indifi'erent  to  the  distinction  between  fact 
and  truth,  as  practically  to  believe  them  identical  or  of 
like  sacredness  ;  so  that  when  science  condemns  mira- 
cle as  an  irrational  or  intellectually  immoral  preten- 
sion, the  church  feels  its  very  existence  threatened, 
and  its  sole  raison  d'etre  denied.  Whereas  it  should 
say,  if  it  were  any  longer  Divinely  empowered  to  say 
anything  :  "  True,  miracle  is  irrational,  and  I  equally 
with  you  condemn  it  as  unworthy  of  men's  present 
belief.  But  it  was  once  the  only  form  under  which 
human  stupidity  allowed  the  truth  of  God's  infinitude 
to  become  realized  by  human  thought,  and  I  prize 
that  truth  of  truths  so  highly  that  I  can  scarcely  feel, 
as  you  do,  like  taking  vengeance  upon  the  expressive 
symbol  which  alone  preserved  it  to  my  apprehension. 
A  sentimental  mother  sometimes  tenderly  preserves 
the  cradle  in  which  her  first-born  was  rocked  asleep. 


OF  THE  CREATIVE  INFINITUDE.  351 

I  don't  know  that  one  can  justify  this  proceeding 
absolutely ;  but  it  is  at  least  a  pleasanter  sight  than 
to  see  her  attacking  it  with  an  axe  and  chopping  it 
up  for  firewood." 


mill  II  MiiiiiiiiiiiiiH— 

■■HPi 

nHBBH 

«m 

IMJIIJIIIIBJ 

W^MWA 

^m 

^m 

m 

m 

1 

M 

m 

LETTER    XXIV. 


?Y  DEAR  FRIEND :  —  If  the  considerations 
advanced  in  the  last  letter  have  half  the 
force  to  your  mind  that  they  have  to  mine, 
you  will  be  in  no  danger  of  depending 
upon  science  for  the  supply  of  your  intellectual  nutri- 
ment. The  tether  of  science  is  the  field  of  sense  ; 
and  an  intellect  which  is  inwardly  quickened  there- 
fore :  i.  e.  freed  henceforth  from  sensual  limitation, 
since  it  now  views  the  whole  world  of  sense  only 
in  the  light  of  an  outward  imagery  or  correspondence 
of  man's  inward  being  :  is  scientifically  inappreci- 
able. Properly  speaking,  the  senses  are  completely 
subterranean  to  the  sphere  of  our  characteristic  hu- 
man life,  the  sphere  of  our  characteristic  human  — 
as  distinguished  from  our  animal  —  ajffections  and 
thoughts.  And  one  would  as  soon  think  therefore 
of  consulting  a  grubbing  mole  about  the  approach- 
ing occultation  of  Jupiter,  as  of  consulting  our  best 
scientific   men    (purely   as    such)    in   regard    to   the 


SCIENCE  TEEEENE,   SENSE  SUBTEEEENE.  353 

existence  of  spiritual  or  celestial  realities.  Men  be- 
come acquainted  with  these  realities,  as  it  seems  to 
me,  not  through  any  docile  hearing  of  the  ear  merely, 
still  less  through  any  wearisome  ratiocinative  balan- 
cing of  probabihties,  but  pm^ely  in  the  way  of  an 
exquisitely  inward  or  aesthetic  craving,  that  is,  in  the 
way  of  a  gradual  expansion  or  education  of  the  heart 
to  them.  And  in  my  opinion  consequently  any  man 
must  be  still  unacquainted  with  them  who  needs  the 
testimony  of  his  senses  to  assure  him  of  their  exist- 
ence. For  this  would  imply  that  they  were  not  spir- 
itual but  material  realities,  existing  in  space  and  time. 
Tell  me,  my  friend,  you  who  admit  the  existence  of 
a  legitimate  object  of  adoration  to  the  human  heart, 
that  is,  of  an  infinite  goodness  and  truth,  what  part 
do  your  senses  play  in  promoting  your  belief  of  that 
wholesome  truth  ?  Do  they  steadfastly  lead  you  to 
love  your  neighbor,  or  the  human  race,  by  practically 
postponing  the  demands  of  your  self-love?  Have 
they  ever,  in  fact,  prompted  you  to  make  the  acquaint- 
ance of  good  by  renouncing  your  own  habitual  and 
familiar  evil  ?  Yet  respond  as  you  may  to  these  inter- 
rogations, I  am  persuaded  there  is  literally  no  other 
way  for  us  to  do,  and  attain  to  the  life  of  God  in 
nature.  Anything  short  of  this  leaves  us  in  the  mere 
mud  of  animality,  out  of  which  we  originally  sprung. 
And  though  we  may  all  our  lives  reason  with  the 


354        ESSENTIAL  OR  SPIRITUAL,   AND   EXISTENTIAL 

unction  of  self-styled  seraphs,  or  devils,  we  shall  only 
the  more  effectually  succeed  in  duping  ourselves  :  we 
shall  never  either  of  us  add  one  to  the  ranks  of  true 
—  or  effulgent  Divine-natural  —  manhood. 

The  essential  or  spiritual  Divine  manhood  consists 
in  this  :  that  it  is  wholly  creative,  or  communicative 
of  itself  to  others  created  from  itself,  in  which  others 
it  may  forever  indwell  consequently  as  a  perpetual 
fountain  of  life  or  being.  In  other  words,  it  consists 
in  a  power  of  loving  infinitely  :  that  is,  without  regard 
to  self.  Such  doubtless  is  the  tide  of  creative  life  or 
being  taken  at  its  flood,  or  viewed  in  itself:  what  now 
is  it  taken  at  its  ebb,  or  viewed  in  its  results  ? 

The  answer  to  this  question  is  very  simple.  The 
existential  or  natural  Divine  manhood  consequent  upon 
this  essential  or  spiritual  infinitude  in  God  —  for  we 
can  no  more  conceive  of  an  Esse  or  being  without  a  cor- 
responding Existere  or  going  forth,  than  we  can  con- 
ceive of  spirit  without  the  implication  of  nature  —  con- 
sists in  a  most  real  and  adoring  response  on  the  part  of 
the  creature  thus  miraculously  endowed  with  being. 
What  is  this  response  ?  It  consists  exclusively  in  the 
power  which  the  creature  has  to  love  finitely :  for 
finite  love,  so  it  be  genuine  and  unaffected,  is  spiritu- 
ally one  or  harmonic  with  infinite  love.  Now,  the 
only  way  in  which  finite  love  can  guarantee  its  own 
genuineness,  or  its  spiritual  and  intimate  unity  with 


OR  NATURAL,  DIVINE  MANHOOD.  355 

infinite  love,  is  by  subordinating  self-love  to  it :  that 
is,  by  loving  others  at  the  expense  of  itself.  For  as 
to  "  love  infinitely,"  that  is,  creatively,  means  to  exert 
a  wholly  objective  love,  or  one  which  encounters  no 
obstacle  or  impediment  in  the  subjectivity  of  the  crea- 
tor, but  leaves  the  creature  alone  conscious,  so  the 
creature,  or  finite  lover,  on  his  part,  is  bound  to  signal- 
ize Jiis  love,  or  avouch  its  truth,  by  overcoming  what- 
ever impediment  his  subjectivity  or  selfhood  offers  to 
its  exercise.  And  in  no  way  short  of  this  will  he 
ever  succeed  in  manifesting  his  own  true  quality. 
For  if  he  should  love  by  the  direct  force  of  selfhood, 
that  is,  without  pungent  self-denial,  or  the  constraint 
of  his  own  subjective  tendencies,  he  would  love  not 
finitely,  but  infinitely :  that  is,  he  would  be  no  longer 
creature,  but  creator. 

This  seems  plain  enough,  and  we  need  not  attempt 
to  make  it  more  so.  But  it  is  logically  incumbent 
upon  me  to  point  out  the  philosophic  inference  with 
which  this  most  benign  truth  is  fraught :  an  inference 
which  leaves  the  philosophy  of  incredulity,  or  the 
science  of  mere  rationalistic  negation  which  we  are 
combating,  no  honest  leg  to  go  upon.  Bear  in  mind 
all  the  while,  however,  that  I  say  no  word  in  dispar- 
agement of  the  legitimate  activity  of  science.  I  only 
arraign  the  wisdom  of  those  of  her  particular  votaries 
who  are  not  content  with  this  legitimate  activity  of 


356       THE  SUBJECTIVE  ELEMENT  IN  EXPERIENCE 

their  mistress,  but  incessantly  attempt  to  pervert  it 
into  a  power  eminently  if  not  absolutely  hostile  to  the 
race's  spiiitual  welfare. 

If  then  it  be  the  law  of  the  finite  intelligence  to 
realize  a  life  or  being  in  harmony  with  that  of  its 
creator  only  by  postponing  itself  to  others,  or  inwardly 
dying  to  its  own  subjective  tendencies,  it  follows  that 
the  subjective  element  in  existence  is  an  evil  ele- 
ment, and  is  obliged  to  be  definitely  overcome  or  set 
at  nought  in  the  creature's  experience,  before  he  can 
have  any  taste  of  true  being.  He  may  indeed  have 
conscious  existence  to  any  extent  you  please,  that  is, 
may  compass  the  fullest  possible  acquaintance  both 
with  physical  pleasure  and  pain,  and  moral  good  and 
evil :  but  his  physical  and  moral  existence  do  not  con- 
stitute his  being,  they  merely  give  him  self-conscious- 
ness, which  is  the  opposite  of  being.  These  physical 
and  moral  experiences  of  his  are  providentially  in 
his  way  to  being,  I  admit,  but  they  are  in  the  way 
as  an  obstacle  and  not  as  a  help  if  he  be  inclined  to 
rest  in  them,  just  as  New  York  to  an  inhabitant  of 
Boston  is  in  his  way  to  Washington,  if  he  be  disin- 
clined to  stay  in  New  York :  but  they  are  not  his 
being  any  more  than  New  York  is  Washington. 
They  doubtless  seem  to  himself,  while  he  is  spiritually 
ignorant  or  unconscious  of  what  true  being  is,  to 
be  the  veritable  thing  itself;  and  doubtless  also  this 


INTEINSICALLY  EVIL  AND  PERISHABLE.  357 

seeming  life  or  being  of  his  negatively  promotes  his 
eventual  experience  of  the  reality,  inasmuch  as  by  mis- 
leading him  into  the  gravest  practical  mistakes  of  judg- 
ment and  errors  of  conduct,  it  gradually  stimulates  re- 
flection upon  himself,  and  ends  by  convincing  him  that 
the  reliance  he  has  hitherto  had  on  selfhood  as  a  basis 
of  true  being,  has  been  grossly  misplaced.  All  this 
is  true,  but  only  confirms  what  I  have  been  saying, 
namely  :  that  the  life  a  man  is  subjectively  conscious 
of,  whatever  providential  uses  may  incidentally  sanc- 
tify it  to  his  true  life,  is  yet  all  unworthy  to  be  his 
true  life ;  nor  does  it  ever  of  itself  exert  any  other 
than  a  strictly  negative  bearing  upon  such  true  life. 

The  subjective  element  in  experience,  then,  is  an 
evil  element,  especially  in  human  life,  where  it  attains 
to  really  devilish  dimensions,  or  becomes  every  par- 
ticular man's  private  and  most  sacred  selfliood, 
organizing  him  into  the  fiercest  and  most  jealous 
antagonism  with  every  other  man,  his  natural  fellow. 
What  makes  it  evil?  Because  being  a  purely 
supposititious  or  fantastic  life,  it  puts  a  man,  so 
far  as  he  comes  under  its  influence,  out  of  true  re- 
lation to  God  who  is  his  only  source  of  being,  and 
so  turns  him  into  a  more  and  more  finite  or  organic 
existence  merely,  with  no  chances  of  mental  expan- 
sion or  enlargement  accordingly  but  in  the  way 
of   imagination   or   insane   illusion.     The    happiness 


358  SCIENCE  A  PERPETUAL  STRAINER 

of  a  conscious  or  created  being  must  consist  in 
the  peaceful  or  harmonious  relations  that  bind  it  to 
its  creator.  And  if  these  relations  are  falsified  at  their 
very  core,  by  the  creature  coming  to  refer  his  being 
to  himself,  or  to  put  himseK  practically  in  the  place 
of  God  with  respect  to  every  important  interest  and 
responsibility  of  life,  disease,  disaster,  and  death  are 
bound,  of  course,  in  the  interest  of  his  own  eventual 
spiritual  sanity,  to  ensue  :  and  meanwhile  the  human 
family  goes  on  to  realize  life  as  best  it  can  in  the 
discordant,  disgusting,  and  wellnigh  intolerable,  form 
under  which  we  at  present  know  it. 

Now  science  cannot  go  behind  the  senses.  She  is 
the  first  dry  land  bred  of  their  watery  and  wide-welter- 
ing chaos,  and  her  obvious  raison  d'etre  is  to  furnish 
a  kindly  fixed  earth  to  men's  feet,  while  they  are  try- 
ing to  realize  a  worthier  life  for  themselves  than  sense 
and  science  both  are  capable  of  ministering.  She  is 
not,  and  never  will  be,  the  beckoning  heaven  of  men's 
eternal  hope  and  aspiration ;  she  is  but  the  necessary 
illustrative  earth  of  their  peaceful  and  orderly  enjoy- 
ment, until  that  heaven  yields  itself  to  their  solicita- 
tions. And  she  cannot  go  beyond  her  foundations. 
Beginning  in  sense  and  its  necessities,  she  must 
always  report  herself  to  the  guardianship  of  sense  to 
have  her  labors  identified  and  acknowledged.  And 
as  the  senses  are  too  dull  and  blunt  to  recognize  truth 


FOR  THE   IMBECILE  JUDGMENTS   OF   SENSE.         359 

save  in  the  lifeless  form  of  fact,  so  science  consequently, 
the  child  of  sense  on  the  maternal  side,  is  nothing: 
more  than  a  living  memory  of  the  race,  organizing  the 
facts  of  universal  experience  and  observation  which  are 
requisite  to  base  its  future  intellectual  and  spiritual 
unity.  And  being  thus  tethered  as  she  is  to  sense  or 
the  realm  of  mere  appearance  in  man,  it  is  grotesquely 
impudent  in  her  to  pretend  to  have  a  speculation  to 
offer,  or  a  word  to  say,  in  reference  to  any  deeper  ques- 
tion of  man's  being.  His  being  is  essentially  immor- 
tal, and  the  bare  shadow  of  it  therefore  at  most  falls 
within  the  realm  of  time  and  space,  or  reports  itself 
to  sense;  and  what  should  we  think  of  a  blockhead 
who  offered  to  give  us  a  knowledge  of  the  physiology 
of  the  human  body,  upon  no  other  basis  than  that 
supplied  by  a  man's  occasional  shadow  in  a  looking- 
glass  ? 

Let  us  expect  no  help  from  science  then,  and  a 
fortiori  none  from  sense,  in  respect  to  our  partici- 
pation in  God's  living  or  spiritual  creation.  It  is 
very  true  that  the  spiritual  creation  is  eternally  an- 
chored in  sense,  because  man's  rudimental  conception 
of  Divine  existence  or  order  is  exclusively  organic 
or  outward ;  but  sense  has  no  perception  of  the  honor 
done  it  in  this  creative  anchorage,  persuading  itself 
indeed  that  creation  is  altogether  physical,  and  that 
its  own  function  is  simply  to  look  on  and  reason 


360  NOT  SENSE,    BUT  SELFHOOD,   THE  CHIEF 

about  the  spectacle,  and  in  the  long  run  end  pos- 
sibly —  who  knows  ?  —  by  enjoying  it.  In  the  ear- 
liest literature  of  the  race,  which  is  always  symbolic 
or  sacred,  sense  is  denominated  the  serpent,  because 
cradling  as  it  does  man's  infant  intelligence  it  takes 
him  captive  unawares,  and  makes  him  think  that 
its  own  good  and  evil,  its  own  true  and  false,  its 
own  pleasure  and  pain,  are  the  measure  of  all  Divine 
or  spiritual  reality.  There  is  not  much  danger  of 
this  effect  now,  for  owing  to  the  race's  long  expe- 
rience sense  is  pretty  well  unmasked,  and  has  had 
its  poor  rampant  and  innocent  head  quite  sufficiently 
bruised  indeed  under  the  heel  of  men.  That  is  to 
say :  the  humbuggery  of  sense  and  its  promises  is 
now  perfectly  understood  in  theory,  and  the  human 
race  once  having  learned  is  not  likely  soon  to  un- 
learn the  lesson,  however  indifiPerent  to  it  any  num- 
ber of  individuals  may  continue  to  show  themselves 
in  practice.  Man  is  vastly  more  liable  to  harm 
nowadays  from  the  feeblest  whispers  of  his  own 
inmost  and  unsuspected  Eve  or  selfliood,  than  from 
the  loudest  outward  vociferation  of  his  senses.  And 
this  is  a  liability  which  all  his  science  based  on 
sense  is  noway  competent  to  shield  him  from,  but 
only  to  deepen  his  experience  of:  which  remark 
brings  me,  by  a  somewhat  loitering  lUioiir  I  admit, 
to  what  I  left  so  incompletely  said  about  the  church 


OBSTACLE  TO  MAN'S  SPIRITUAL  WELFARE.        361 

and  its  liistory  in  my  sixteenth  Letter,  But  before 
resuming  the  thread  of  our  discourse  there  inter- 
rupted let  us  bring  the  present  letter  to  a  close. 

All  the  science  or  knowledge  of  life  to  which  I  am 
begotten,  born,  and  bred  by  our  existing  civilization, 
tells  me  with  an  undeviating  persistency,  that  there  is 
nothing  so  Divinely  true,  because  so  Divinely  sweet 
and  sufficing,  as  selfliood :  and  the  consequence  is 
that  I  actually  succeed  in  giving  the  real  Divinity 
in  my  great  race  or  nature  only  a  scant  and  drowsy 
recognition.  Indeed  if  I  should  freely  yield  to  the 
scientific  instinct  within  me,  or  abandon  myself  to 
the  current  inspiration  of  culture  about  me,  I  doubt 
not  I  should  end  by  altogether  sacrificing  that  patient 
Divinity  to  the  unscrupulous  idol  and  counterfeit 
enshrined  in  myself.  For  then  my  senses  authenti- 
cated by  science,  and  unchecked  by  conscience,  would 
be  free  to  tell  me  that  my  life  or  being  is  strictly 
identical  with  my  finite  personality,  and  that  the 
only  death  and  hell  I  shall  ever  have  to  dread  is 
one  which  menaces  that  personality  with  desolation  : 
namely,  the  death  and  hell  wrapped  up  in  my  most 
intimate  or  Divine-natural  innocence,  truth,  and  chas- 
tity. I  confess  though  that  having  had  one's  eyes 
once  opened  to  a  glimmer  of  eternal  truth  on  the 
subject,  one  has  no  hesitation  in  hoping  that  before 
he  is  caught  hearkening  to  this  gospel  of  an  atheistic 


362      NIRVANA,   OR  SELF-EXTINCTION,    IMPOSSIBLE 


and  drunken  self-conceit,  he  may  actually  perish  out 
of  life,  and  the  great  lord  of  life  know  him  no  more 
forever.  I  for  one  should  distinctly  prefer  forfeit- 
ing my  self-consciousness  altogether,  to  being  found 
capable,  in  ever  so  feeble  a  degree,  of  identifying 
my  being  with  it.  My  being  lies  utterly  outside  of 
myself,  lies  in  utterly  forgetting  myself,  lies  in  ut- 
terly unlearning  and  disusing  all  its  elaborately  petty 
schemes  and  dodges  now  grown  so  transparent  that 
a  child  is  not  deceived  by  them :  lies  in  fact  in  hon- 
estly identifymg  myself  with  others.  I  know  it  will 
never  be  possible  for  me  to  do  this  perfectly,  that 
is,  attain  to  self-extinction,  because  being  created,  I 
can  never  hope  actually  to  become  Divine;  but  at 
all  events  I  shall  become  through  eternal  years  more 
and  more  intimately  one  in  nature,  and  I  hope  in 
spirit,  with  a  being  who  is  thoroughly  destitute  of 
this  finiting  principle,  that  is,  a  being  who  is  without 
selfhood  save  in  His  creatures.  And  certainly  the 
next  best  thing  to  being  God,  is  to  know  Him,  for 
this  knowledge  makes  one  content  with  any  burden 
of  personal  limitation.  I  all  along  admit  of  course 
that  I,  like  every  other  man,  have  a  natural  capacity 
in  myself  for  that  harmless  ruminant  or  reflective 
life,  which  to  the  sceptical  or  scientific  mind  is  the 
very  ideal  human  life.  But  I  would  have  you  most 
distinctly  to  understand  that  this  respectable  bovine 


TO  CREATED  OR  SELF-CONSCIOUS  EXISTENCE.     363 

style  of  existence,  with  the  whole  Divine-human  aro- 
ma, or  miraculous  quality,  of  life  left  out  of  it,  is  not 
in  the  least  my  ideal.  The  idea  of  the  life  I  my- 
self covet  or  aspire  to,  is  that  of  free,  unforced,  irre- 
fective,  spontaneous  goodness,  realizable  only  through 
a  Divine  reconstruction  of  my  nature.  And  I  would 
infinitely  rather  die  outright,  accordingly,  with  no 
chance  of  any  lesser  resurrection,  than  yield  one  iota 
of  this  most  lovely  human  hope  and  aspiration  to 
the  flimsy  reasoners  who  lead  our  present  intellectual 
decadence,  and  pitch  the  tune  for  the  base  unwhole- 
some crew  to  dance  to,  which  with  lower  aims  than 
theirs  yet  vaticinates  in  the  same  strain. 

I  rejoice,  then,  with  unspeakable  joy  in  the  gospel 
legend,  or  the  fact  of  Christ's  birth  from  a  virgin,  and 
of  his  resurrection  from  death :  certainly  not  because 
of  any  literal  or  absolute  worth  the  facts  bear  to  my 
imagination,  for  in  themselves  they  leave  my  imagi- 
nation wholly  unimpressed,  as  they  leave  my  reason 
baffled  ;  but  because  they  alone  suggest  to  my  heart 
and  mind  the  spiritual  truth  of  God's  infinitude.  Ah ! 
the  marvellous  truth  which  is  avouched  for  us  in 
the  Christian  legend !  The  simply  adorable  and 
ineffable  truth  of  God's  natural  manhood,  of  the 
Divine  nature  made  human  down  to  the  veriest  flesh 
and  bones  dk''  humanity,  and  of  our  nature  conse- 
quently exalted  into  the   sole  vehicle  thenceforth  of 


364         THE  GOSPEL  FACTS  WORTHLESS  SAVE  AS 

God's  spiritual  perfection  !  To  think  hereupon  what 
a  stupid  dreary  thing  the  human  soul  is  reduced  to 
after  it  has  undergone  scientific  manipulation,  and 
been  run  into  a  mere  pruritus  of  the  senses  !  Ham- 
let the  play  with  Hamlet  the  person  left  out  is  noth- 
ing in  comparison.  The  melancholy  thing  in  this 
case  is  —  not  that  one's  bread  of  life  becomes  mere 
unleavened  dough,  for  one  can  exist  well  enough, 
if  bare  existence  contents  him,  on  unleavened 
bread ;  but  that  any  considerable  number  of  men 
should  be  so  lacking  in  the  sentiment  of  infinitude 
within  their  proper  nature,  as  willingly  to  make 
sense,  in  which  all  animals  are  superior  to  them,  the 
sovereign  arbiter  of  truth  in  intellectual  things !  I 
beg  however  that  you  will  not  think  that  it  seems 
to  me  vitally  important  in  what  sense  the  existing 
battle  between  religious  faith  and  science  is  settled. 
Neither  party  is  contending  for  the  interests  of  the 
living  God,  so  spiritually  active  at  present  within  the 
precincts  of  human  nature,  but  only  and  at  best  for 
those  of  some  traditional  deity  now  deceased;  the 
deity,  for  example,  of  orthodox  ecclesiastical  culture. 
The  worship  of  this  time-and-space  deity  at  this  day, 
and  especially  in  this  land,  where  human  natiu-e  is 
vindicating  with  startling  emphasis  and  iteration  its 
immaculate  Divine  dignity  against  all  manner  of  finite 
private  or  personal  pretension  in  men,  seems  to  me  a 


A  REVELATION  OF  GOD'S  INFINITUDE.  365 

grievous  anachronism,  and  is  clearly  not  worth  con- 
tending for.  Take  any  chance  dozen  reputable  men 
of  the  world  (so-called)  who  practically  deny  the 
existence  of  any  deity  outside  of  our  own  nature ; 
and  then  take  any  similar  dozen  of  reputable  religious 
men  (so-called)  who  practically  affirm  the  existence 
of  a  deity  with  distinctively  supernatural  and  super- 
human attributes :  and  I  defy  you  to  discover  any 
other  and  deeper  practical  difference  between  them. 
No,  their  sole  visible  difference  is  constituted  by  the 
presence  or  absence  of  the  religious  profession,  to- 
gether with  a  certain  stifling  pious  decorum  which 
that  profession  imposes :  not  in  the  least  by  any 
characteristic  spiritual  superiority  of  either  class  to 
the  other.  So  far  as  the  interests  and  intercourse 
of  this  humdrum  moral  or  superficial  life  are  in  ques- 
tion, I  venture  to  say  you  would  confide  in  one  class 
quite  as  readily  as  in  the  other.  But,  unless  I  am 
greatly  mistaken,  you  would  intelligently  confide  in 
neither  class,  so  far  as  their  relations  to  man's  un- 
seen and  veracious  spiritual  being  are  concerned. 

I  said  a  moment  since  that  the  gospel  facts,  the 
miraculous  facts  alleged  in  connection  with  Christ 
Jesus,  did  not  in  themselves  pique  either  my  aesthetic 
or  rational  interest.  The  reason  doubtless  is  that  the 
Christian  facts  are  creative  facts,  ultimate  facts  of 
man's  universal  being,  and  make  no  appeal  to  my  in- 


366      THE  SCIENTIFIC  OR  ONTOLOGIC  HYPOTHESIS 

dividual  self-love,  save  in  a  reflex  way.  I  am  not 
spiritually  a  creature  of  God  in  ray  own  right,  or  in 
my  individual  capacity,  but  only  in  so  far  as  I  become 
identified  in  affection  and  thought  with  miiversal  man, 
or  the  interests  of  the  Divine  righteousness  upon 
earth.  The  Christian  facts  must  always  be  regarded, 
when  regarded  intelhgently,  as  a  rigid  accommoda- 
tion of  spiritual  or  supersensuous  truth  to  man's 
natural  or  sensuous  understanding :  the  truth  accom- 
modated being  that  of  God's  infinitude,  which  makes 
Him  a  spiritual  or  living  creator  of  men  and  by 
no  means  a  natural  or  dead  creator ;  which,  in  fact, 
stamps  the  whole  realm  of  nature  as  void  of  abso- 
lute significance,  or  turns  it,  solid  foundation  as  it  is 
for  our  senses,  into  a  boundless  inirage  whenever 
we  seek  to  get  any  direct  spiritual  instruction  from 
it.  In  short  the  facts  pointedly  refuse  to  be  inter- 
preted by  any  scientific  or  ontologic  hypothesis  of 
creation,  which  identifies  the  being  of  things  with 
their  existence  in  space  and  time,  and  thus  quietly 
eliminates  from  the  problem  a  spiritual  or  living 
and  infinite  creator.  There  is  no  more  vicious 
habit  of  mind  accordingly  in  the  point  of  view  of 
philosophy  than  that  which  drives  us  to  speculate 
an  ontologic  basis  to  the  spiritual  creation,  in  think- 
ing it  to  be  really  or  objectively  identical  with  out- 
ward nature.     Man   is  not  naturally  immortal,  and 


OF  BEING   FUNDAMENTALLY  STUPID  AND  VOID.   367 

only  harm  is  done  by  leading  him  to  think  himself 
so.  By  natural  birth,  or  in  himself,  he  is  to  the  last 
degree  corrupt  and  perishable,  and  though  his  science 
demonstrates  any  amount  of  order,  peace,  and  pro- 
ductive power  in  his  animal  and  vegetable  and  min- 
eral connections,  it  is  utterly  powerless  to  promise 
himself  any  resurrection  from  the  death  which  is  la- 
tent in  his  own  flesh  and  bones.  To  be  sure  science 
is  just  as  impotent  to  menace  him  with  a  contrary 
fate,  because  as  science  is  functionally  confined  to 
the  realm  of  mortal  existence,  it  must  needs  confess 
itself  a  mere  idiotic  guesser  in  relation  to  every 
interest  of  his  unseen  and  immortal  being. 

I  do  not  say,  then,  that  Jesus  Christ  is  of  any  pri- 
vate consequence  to  me  more  than  any  other  man  is, 
or  that  I  derive  the  least  hope  or  comfort  from  his 
recorded  life  and  conversation  to  my  personal  or  self- 
ish desire  of  immortality.  I  have  no  doubt  indeed 
that  I  shall  live  after  death,  with  perhaps  unhap- 
pily a  greatly  enhanced  force  of  selfhood  moreover, 
and  quite  independently  of  my  inherited  or  culti- 
vated religious  faith.  But  any  amount  of  mere  post- 
mortem consciousness  would  prove  a  sorry  equivalent 
for  immortality.  Man  realizes  immortal  life,  I  infer 
from  the  Christian  facts,  and  somewhat  from  my  own 
observation  of  human  life  as  well,  only  under  his 
own  spiritual  midwifery ;  that  is,  only  by  voluntarily 


368  HOW  MAN  REALIZES  IMMORTALITY. 

compelling  himself  against  the  inspiration  of  his  self- 
hood, and  frankly  obeying  the  inflowing  instincts  of 
fellowship  or  society  which  alone  unite  him  with  his 
kind,  or  out  of  a  very  disgusting  animal  make  him 
for  the  first  time  a  man.  In  short,  a  man  realizes 
life  Divine  and  immortal  only  by  coming  to  view 
himself  as  so  much  mere  rubbish  in  comparison  with 
his  fellows,  and  clinging  with  renewed  affections  to 
his  Divinely  redeemed  race  or  nature.  It  is  astonish- 
ing what  force  and  expansion  this  new  and  Divine 
love  of  one's  kind  imports  into  our  ordinarily  grace- 
less consciousness,  or  the  unrelieved  tenor  of  our 
daily  life.  How  it  enlarges  the  objective  element  in 
consciousness,  and  annihilates  the  subjective  element 
comparatively,  till  at  last  every  commonest  natural 
form  of  use  seems  aromatic  with  Divinity,  and  all 
men  who  are  not  vowed  to  idleness  or  pleasure  grow 
Divinely  chaste,  as  all  women  are  Divinely  fau'  and 
modest.  But  I  only  want  to  say  that  incarnation 
avouches  itself  to  the  heart  the  sole  philosophic  secret 
of  creation,  and  the  Christian  facts  in  embodying  this 
secret  in  a  cypher  as  it  were  until  such  time  as  the 
human  mind  had  grown  wise  enough  by  experience 
to  unriddle  it,  impose  a  definite  end  to  men's  crude 
speculations  in  seeking  a  scientific  or  ontological  clew 
to  the  mysteries  of  creative  and  created  being. 
Perhaps  it  will  not  be  amiss  to  close  this  letter 


A  PERSONAL  REMINISCENCE.  369 

by  a  personal  reminiscence  having  some  relation  to 
its  theme. 

A  good  many  years  ago  in  Paris  I  lived  in  the 

same  house  with  Mrs. ,  a  most  charming  and 

amiable  old  lady,  who  was  the  mother  by  a  former 
marriage  of  a  very  distinguished  son,  with  whom  I 
had  been  for  several  years  on  terms  of  friendly  ac- 
quaintance, and  who  was  polite  enough  to  insist  on 
my  making  his  mother's  acquaintance  also.  The 
mother  was  a  remarkably  handsome  woman,  of  the 
gentlest  address  and  manners,  but  she  very  soon 
revealed  to  me  that  her  peace  of  mind  had  been  very 
much  disturbed  by  doubts  of  the  religious  dogmas 
in  which  she  was  bred,  and  to  which  she  tried  to 
continue  faithful.  I  usually  endeavored  to  relieve  her 
depressed  spirits  by  talk  about  her  son,  whom  she 
almost  idolized,  and  about  the  very  remarkable  lec- 
tures he  had  given  in  New  York,  and  other  cheerful 
topics,  but  somehow  our  conference  always  reverted 
to  a  discussion  of  her  religious  perplexities,  which 
were  indeed  sufficiently  sombre  and  menacing.  Her 
husband,  who  seemed  a  very  amiable  man,  was  a 
half-pay  officer  in  the  English  army,  altogether  vowed 
to  reading,  and  not  much  disposed  to  interest  him- 
self in  drawing-room  gossip.  One  evening  I  had 
mounted  to  their  apartment,  and  found  there  an  Irish 
lady,  of  extremely  prepossessing  appearance,  who  was 


370  ANECDOTE   OF  A  MURDERER'S  MUNDANE 

the  wife  of  the  Paris  correspondent  of  one  of  the 
London  daily  papers,  and  who  apparently  was  enter- 
taining our  hostess  with  some  account  of  Sweden- 
borg's  books.  She  seemed  to  know  something  of 
what  she  talked  about,  and  had  evidently  read  Swe- 
denborg's  writings  with  a  certain  interest  and  in- 
struction. But  I  thought  upon  the  whole  that  she 
presented  her  subject  in  too  sentimental  a  light  to 
attract  her  friend's  serious  attention,  and  it  occurred 
to  me  to  tell  a  story  which  might  give  a  somewhat 
grimmer  and  more  realistic  impression  of  his  lore. 
It  was  a  narrative  I  had  lately  found  in  one  of 
Swedenborg's  private  diaries,  if  I  am  not  mistaken, 
of  a  murderer's  entrance  into  the  spiritual  world, 
whose  execution  took  place  in  Stockholm,  and  whose 
courage  had  evidently  been  buoyed  by  a  very  strong 
confidence  that  the  rope  would  break,  and  the  hour 
appointed  for  his  execution  elapse  before  it  could  be 
repaired  or  readjusted.  Accordingly  when  the  drop 
fell,  and  set  the  criminal  free  for  his  spiritual  career, 
Swedenborg,  who  watched  all  the  details  of  the  in- 
cident through  the  eyes  of  his  attendant  spirits,  saw 
him  pick  himself  up  in  the  other  world  with  great 
alacrity,  and  betake  himself  to  running  towards  the 
open  country  as  if  to  put  the  greatest  possible  space 
between  himself  and  the  Stockholm  rabble.  His  zeal 
in  running  became  so  furious  as  to  attract  attention, 


POST-MORTEM   PERTURBATIONS.  371 

and  some  good  spirits  at  length  put  after  him  to 
chase  him  down,  and  ascertain  what  fly  had  bitten  him 
that  he  ran  with  such  reckless  speed.  He  was  not 
long  in  yielding  to  their  friendly  overtures,  but  in- 
sisted that  he  should  not  be  taken  back  to  Stockholm, 
saying  that  the  rope  had  broken,  and  the  time  was 
now  past  that  had  been  appointed  for  his  execution. 
The  good  people  who  had  interested  themselves  in 
him  perceived  at  once  that  he  had  taken  a  longer 
leap  than  he  himself  was  at  all  aware  of,  and  very 
soon  left  him  in  the  hands  of  certain  spirits  of  his 
own  kidney  to  whose  company  he  betrayed  a  much 
stronger  liking. 

The  story  was  not  perhaps  exhilarating  as  a  story, 
but  I  had  no  sooner  begun  it  than  I  observed  the 
husband  of  our  hostess  lift  his  eyes  from  the  open 
book  before  him,  and  sit  in  an  attitude  of  great  ex- 
pectancy till  I  had  ended.  Then  he  rose  and  shut 
his  book,  at  the  same  time  saying  to  me,  that  if  he 
could  believe  the  incident  I  had  related,  it  would 
be  all  over  with  his  doubts  about  immortality,  for 
the  incident  in  question  bore  very  strongly  upon  the 
only  two  points  on  which  his  doubts  pivoted  :  first, 
that  of  the  persistence  of  man's  personal  identity 
beyond  the  grave ;  and,  second,  the  persistence  of 
his  conscious  freedom.  If,  therefore,  he  could  only 
believe  that  Svvedenborg  had  actually  witnessed  the 


372        NO  DEGREE  OF  POST-MORTEM  EXPERIENCE 

occurrence  I  related,  he  would  be  extremely  happy; 
but  ah  !  the  way  to  believe  Swedenborg ! 

I  told  him  that  I  had  not  reckoned  upon  interest- 
ing him  in  my  poor  little  anecdote,  but  that  it  was 
intended  to  placate  the  anxieties  of  his  wife  which 
were  always  the  effect  of  an  influx  of  evil  spirits,  by 
suggesting  to  her  mind  the  fact  of  the  death-process 
being  in  every  case  so  very  humane  and  natural  as 
to  leave  even  a  criminal  like  this  vile  murderer  ut- 
terly undisturbed  as  to  his  habitual  thought  and  con- 
sciousness, and  intent  still  only  upon  cheating  the 
hangman.  I  furthermore  remarked  that  I  had  my- 
self no  doubt  of  the  absolute  reality  of  this  incident 
to  Swedenborg's  experience,  because  I  could  not  con- 
ceive of  the  creator  of  men  once  endowing  them  with 
conscious  life  or  freedom,  and  then  conceive  of  Him  as 
again  under  any  possible  circumstances  revoking  His 
gift.  But  I  also  told  him  that  I  had  been  not  a 
little  interested  to  discover  that  so  intelligent  a  person 
as  he  should  be  prepared  to  say  that  all  his  desires 
after  immortality  would  be  met  in  his  experience  of 
the  indefinite  persistence  of  the  natural  life.  Doubt- 
less Swedenborg's  Arcana  Calestia  were  apt  to  breed 
a  pretty  firm  conviction  in  the  mind  of  the  reader 
that  an  orderly  conscious  existence,  however  variously 
motived  on  the  part  of  the  subject,  is  the  assured 
providential  destiny  of  all  men  after  death.     But  I 


EQUIVALENT  TO  IMMORTAL  LIFE.  373 

should  never  think  of  recommending  a  course  of  Swe- 
denborg  in  order  to  produce  that  conviction  simply, 
under  the  impression  that  it  was  at  all  equivalent 
to  a  belief  in  eternal  life,  Swedenborg  never  by  any 
chance  represents  one's  post-mortem  existence,  how- 
ever circumstantially  defined  it  may  be,  as  guarantee- 
ing him  against  the  chances  of  the  second  death,  or 
as  being  by  any  means  the  same  thing  with  his 
immortal  life.  Indeed  our  immortal  interests,  ac- 
cording to  Swedenborg's  sho\^^ng,  are  much  more 
nearly  dependent  upon  our  cis -mortem  ideas  and 
practices,  than  they  are  upon  any  imaginable  amount 
of  trans-mortem  experience,  were  it  the  very  happiest. 
For  immortal  life,  to  every  one  who  experiences  it, 
is  the  realization  of  his  true  or  spiritual  and  God- 
given  individuality,  that  which  has  been  at  most 
merely  symbolized  by  his  natural  selfhood,  but  never 
in  the  faintest  degree  constituted  by  it.  So  that 
whatever  a  man's  natural  selfhood  may  be  in  a  moral 
or  outward  aspect,  determining  him  possibly  in  one 
case  straight  to  heaven,  in  the  other  straight  to  hell, 
it  will  be  utterly  without  any  power  to  determine  his 
relation  to  God,  or  his  chances  of  immortality. 

Immortal  life  to  Swedenborg  always  means  one 
definite  thing,  and  that  is  —  soul-power,  or  the  prev- 
alence of  a  man's  inward  life  over  his  outward  one. 
It  means :    the  soid's  exclusive  poioer   to   regulate  a 


374  IMMORTALITY   DEPENDS  UPON  NO 

mans  outward,  that  is,  his  jjhysical  and  moral,  rela- 
tions, and  so  produce  an  ever-growing  imoard  and 
ineffable  harmony  hetioeen  him  and  his  creative  source : 
so  that  any  man  in  whom  this  result  in  any  sincere 
degree  however  shght  is  freely  achieved,  or  his  soul 
has  learned  to  rule  and  his  body  to  obey,  has  ipso 
facto  entered  upon  immortal  life ;  and  this  man  only. 
How  then  shall  one  attain  to  this  soul-power  ? 

Certainly  not  through  the  exhibition  of  any  vicious 
personal  favour  on  God's  part  towards  him:  for  in 
the  first  place  God  has  no  such  personal  favour  to 
bestow  on  any  man,  were  he  in  all  moral  regards  the 
pattern  man  of  his  race ;  and  in  the  second  place  if 
He  had  any  such  personal  favour  to  bestow,  the 
exhibition  of  it  toward  His  favourite  would  only  re- 
sult in  more  effectually  damning  the  unhappy  wretch 
to  hell,  by  infallibly  engendering  within  him  a  meri- 
torious spirit  or  6fe^-righteous  estimate  of  himself 
in  comparison  with  other  less  favoured  men.  I  hope 
we  may  be  careful  each  of  us  never  to  flatter  him- 
self accordingly  that  he  is  the  beloved  of  God, 
and  the  favourite  of  heaven  :  it  were  better  for  our 
spiritual  sanity  in  that  case  that  a  millstone  were 
hung  about  our  necks,  and  we  ourselves  sunk  in 
the  bottom  of  the  sea.  The  only  man  who  was 
ever  born  to  such  an  ominous  unhallowed  prestige 
was  Jesus  Christ;   and  he  worked  himself  clear  of 


PERSONAL  FAVOUR  OF  GOD  TO  US.      375 

the  deep  spiritual  damnation  that  inhered  in  it,  only 
by  making  his  life  from  the  cradle  to  the  grave  one 
of  exquisite  self-demsil,  or  of  earnest  and  assiduous 
contention  —  contention  even  to  death  —  against  the 
rank  personal  homage  and  consecrated  self-esteem 
which  the  fanatical  Jews  endeavoured  to  thrust  upon 
him.  He  was  born  apparently  for  nothing  else  than 
to  flatter  the  God-ward  hopes  of  the  most  devout  and 
diabolical  people  that  ever  lived:  that  is,  to  give 
them  their  long-promised,  at  all  events  their  long- 
expected,  dominion  over  all  other  people.  His  birth 
had  been  so  marvellous,  and  had  been  welcomed  by 
such  a  famished  expectation  on  the  part  of  his  self- 
righteous  nation,  that  if  his  fidelity  to  truth  had  only 
left  him  free  to  forego  his  denunciations  of  their 
national  pretension  to  be  God's  saints,  and  defer  to 
the  obvious  voice  of  prophecy  in  their  behalf,  taking 
the  literal  text  of  their  sacred  books  for  his  guidance, 
he  might  doubtless  have  been  lifted  to  an  unparalleled 
height  of  empire.  And  no  doubt  the  devil  of  his 
secret  thoughts,  the  devil  born  with  his  Jewish  blood, 
often  tempted  him  to  listen  to  these  fleshly  ambitions, 
often  took  him  up  into  an  exceedingly  high  mountain, 
the  mountain  of  his  inherited  personal  pride  and  lust 
of  dominion,  and  showing  him  thence  all  the  king- 
doms of  the  world  and  the  glory  of  them,  said  unto 
him :  Ail  these  will  I  give  thee,  if  thou  icilt  he  guided 


376  CHRIST'S   UNIQUE  LUSTRE,   THAT  HE 

hy  me.  But  although  these  things  must  have  tried 
him  as  never  man  before  or  since  was  tried  (for 
only  think  what  a  nation  of  devout  and  selfish  zealots 
—  the  worst  possible  combination  of  the  elements  of 
human  character  conceivable,  breeding  by  their  con- 
junction the  most  genuine  diabolism  ■ —  he  had  to 
back  him,  if  he  would  only  consent  to  follow  their 
sacred  oracles,  and  fulfil  the  literal  Divine  promises 
which  had  been  made  to  them),  he  never  flinched, 
but  knowing  his  tormentors,  who  they  were,  and  that 
they  were  pre-eminently  of  his  own  filthy  race,  inva- 
riably replied  to  them :  Get  thee  behind  me,  Satan, 
for  it  is  written  thus  atid  so ;  and  I  came  to  do  the 
loill  of  Him  that  sent  me,  and  not  at  all  my  oivn  will. 

This  was  the  merit  of  Christ,  that  he  found  the 
most  assured  religious  hope  and  aspiration  of  his 
people,  based  upon  their  sacred  scriptures,  found  all 
his  instincts  of  patriotism,  all  his  family  instincts,  all 
his  instincts  of  neighborhood  and  friendship,  to  be  on 
the  side  of  his  unlimited  self-love  and  love  of  the 
world,  on  the  devil's  side  in  short,  and  yet  his  truth 
of  soul  was  so  single  and  spotless,  his  perspicacity  so 
unerring,  that  he  never  for  a  moment  faltered,  but 
threw  religion,  country,  family,  friends,  incontinently 
overboard,  or  rather  gave  them  each  a  new  and  spirit- 
ual Divine  reproduction,  that  so  in  solitude,  in  suffer- 
ing, in  ceaseless  anguish  of  soul,  he  might  obey  his 


DESPISED  MAN'S  MORAL  RIGHTEOUSXESS.         377 

inward  instinct  of  the  Divine  name,  and  bequeath 
his  immortal  sorrows  alone  to  mankind  as  the  only 
fit  interpretation  and  remembrancer  of  that  name. 
If  he  had,  but  once  barely,  clasped  joy  instead  of 
sorrow  to  his  bosom,  if  he  had  only  once  preferred 
Jew  to  Gentile,  self  to  neighbour,  truth  to  goodness, 
where  should  we  ever  again  have  looked  for  a  rev- 
elation of  God's  true  or  spiritual  infinitude?  and 
without  such  a  revelation  where  would  be  the  intel- 
lect and  heart  of  man  at  this  day  ?  I  do  not  hesitate 
to  reply,  for  myself:  In  the  grave  of  his  bicrnt-out 
natural  appetites  and  passions. 

But  you  may  be  in  the  habit  of  intellectually  ap- 
preciating the  Christian  truth  differently  from  me, 
and  I  will  at  once,  therefore,  answer  your  question, 
namely :  How  does  a  man  attain  to  that  soul-power, 
which,  and  nothing  else,  is  immortal  life? 

It  is  by  the  inward  perception  of  himself  as  a 
person  whose  nature  has  been  hopelessly  depraved  or 
corrupted  before  it  came  to  his  hands,  by  its  individual 
subjects  in  the  first  place  having  the  presumption 
to  conceive  themselves  to  be  in  their  own  right  crea- 
tures of  the  most  high  God ;  and  then  in  the  second 
place  by  these  individual  subjects  having  the  pre- 
sumption to  live  a  life  of  serene  and  total  spiritual 
indifference  to  the  obligations  of  such  creatureship. 
For  this  is  the  only  real  atheism,  or  vital  profligacy. 


378  NO  MAN  A  CREATURE  OF  GOD   IN  HIS 

of  the  human  heart:  to  be  ready  to  acknowledge 
oneself  in-oneself  2i  creature  of  God,  and  yet  not  to 
be  infinitely  chagrined  and  distressed  by  the  acknowl- 
edgment. I  can  imagine  no  more  revolting  idea  to 
my  own  mind  than  that  of  my  individual  creature- 
ship;  of  my  having  a  creative  right  to  be  or  exist 
in  myself,  that  is,  independently  of  other  men,  and 
independently  besides  of  mineral  and  vegetable  and 
animal :  because  the  prime  and  instant  logical  impli- 
cation of  such  an  idea  would  plainly  be  to  eviscerate 
myself  of  selfhood,  that  is,  both  of  physical  and  moral 
life,  for  a  created  being  has  no  right  either  to  one 
or  the  other.  A  created  being,  if  any  such  could 
exist,  would  be  a  being  so  dead  in  himself  that  the 
very  stones  of  the  street  would  hiss  their  contempt 
at  him;  a  being  of  such  essential  dependence  from 
stem  to  stern,  or  through  and  through,  that  the  bare 
conception  of  his  real  existence  either  to  sense  or 
consciousness  would  be  intellectual  delirium  or  fatu- 
ity. The  only  thing  that  makes  the  acknowledg- 
ment of  my  own  creatureship  tolerable  or  excusable 
to  myself  in  thought,  is  that  I  am  myself  a  wholly 
unreal  or  insubstantial  phenomenon,  whose  unreality 
moreover  is  shared  and  intensified  not  only  by  every 
partaker  of  human  nature,  but  by  every  beast  of  the 
field,  and  every  fowl  of  the  air,  and  every  fish  of 
the  sea.     Por  the  conception  of  anything  as  Divinely 


OWN  EIGHT,   OR  INDEPENDENTLY  OF  OTHERS.      379 

created  involves  for  its  interpretation  tliat  posterior 
and  more  spiritual  conception  of  Divine  power  which 
we  call  redemption,  and  which  perfects  the  former 
conception  by  showing  the  creator  intent  upon  ex- 
tricating His  creatures  from  the  base  animal  investi- 
ture or  deciduous  mother-substance  in  which  their 
mere  creation  leaves  them.  Both  terms  are  derived 
from  the  limitations  of  man's  subjective  consciousness, 
and  are  both  accommodations  of  spiritual  truth  to 
that  consciousness,  without  the  slightest  literal  or 
objective  reality  in  them;  being  both  intended  to 
induct  the  mind  into  the  conception  of  the  Divine- 
human  infinitude  which  underlies  our  nature,  and 
of  the  irresistible  power  which  is  spiritually  mould- 
ing it  into  social  and  orderly  form. 

I  cling  to  my  selfhood  then,  not  in  the  least  as 
aflbrding  any  sign  of  my  own  reality  to  myself,  but 
simply  as  the  sole  evidence  and  guarantee  of  Divin- 
ity or  infinitude  within  my  nature ;  and  in  this  point 
of  view  I  cling  to  it  as  tenaciously  as  ever  my  fa- 
bled progenitor  in  the  garden  of  Eden  clung  to 
his  Divinely-given  Eve.  Eor  in  this  point  of  view 
a  man's  selfhood  is  always  a  common  possession  of 
his  nature  in  him,  and  no  way  his  own  spiritual  or 
private  and  particular  possession ;  a  mere  outgrowth 
and  necessity  of  his  mortal  consciousness  or  appari- 
tion, and  by  no  means  an  appanage  of  his  Divine  or 


380     GOD'S  NEW  CHURCH  A  THOROUGHLY 

immortal  being.  And  this  is  why  I  say  that  it  is 
only  by  the  honest  and  sincere  handhng  of  himself 
as  a  naturally  depraved  subject,  that  a  man  ever 
practically  attains  to  immortal  life.  For  only  in  this 
way  can  he  ever  be  led  to  disesteem  and  disregard 
that  shabby  self-righteous  or  mingled  moralistic  and 
pietistic  culture  which  the  church  commends  to  his 
regard  as  the  aim  and  end  of  his  being,  and  which 
the  church's  necessities  alone  keep  alive  in  the  earth ; 
and  fix  his  thought  upon  the  spiritual  evils  -which 
inhere  in  his  fallacious  natural  selfhood,  especially 
after  this  selfhood  has  undergone  regeneration  by  the 
church  :  which  are  in  truth  the  only  things  that  stand 
between  him  and  the  full  fruition  of  immortal  life. 

Mr. listened  to  what  I  said  with  grave  polite- 
ness outwardly,  but  with  the  inward  air,  I  must  say, 
of  listening  to  one  talking  downright  nonsense ;  but 
the  lovely  person  who  sat  beside  his  wife  on  the 
sofa  took  occasion  to  say  that  she  had  not  entered 
so  deeply  as  I  seemed  to  have  done  into  the  philo- 
sophic purport  of  the  Swedenborgian  literature,  but 
that  she  would  ponder  what  she  had  heard.  I 
thanked  her  most  unaffectedly,  but  took  the  liberty 
of  cautioning  her  at  the  same  time  to  be  more  solici- 
tous in  all  her  readings  of  Swedenborg  to  read  with 
free  open  insight  or  understanding  than  with  zealous 
literal  apprehensiveness,  for  if  we  came  to  Sweden- 


NEW  NATURAL  SPIRIT  OR  LIFE  IN  MAN.  381 

borg  with  any  idea  that  he  addressed  a  single  word 
to  our  natural  ears,  and  not  exclusively  to  our  spirit- 
ual-rational senses,  we  were  assuredly  done  for  before 
we  began.  And  I  had  accordingly  discovered  that 
among  the  very  few  persons  I  knew  who  unblush- 
ingly  called  themselves  literal  adherents  of  Sweden- 
borg  there  was  not  one,  singularly  enough,  who,  so 
far  as  I  perceived,  manifested  the  slightest  spiritual 
discernment  of  that  author's  meaning.  And  there- 
upon I  wished  my  friends  good-night. 


1 

c 

g 

g 

^^^ 

^ 

LETTER    XXV. 


i^^mY  DEAR  PRIEND  :  — The  subject  of  my 
sixteenth  letter  was  the  church  in  antag- 
onism with  the  prevalent  tendencies  of 
human  nature,  which  are  selfishness  and 
worldliness.  And  the  tenor  of  the  letter  was  to 
show  that  whereas  the  church  combats  and  sup- 
plants these  purely  natural  evils  in  man,  all  its 
ability  to  do  so  comes  from  its  quietly  and  uncon- 
sciously originating  a  far  deeper  spiritual  evil  in 
him,  infinitely  worse  than  the  other  two:  the  evil 
of  proprium,  that  is,  of  private  selfhood  or  unrelated, 
independent  character.  Men  do  not  get  their  private 
selfhood  (that  is,  what  gives  to  every  man  his  dis- 
tinctive worth  or  reality  from  every  other)  from  their 
nature,  because  their  nature  is  what  they  all  possess 
in  common,  and  therefore  distinguishes  none.  In 
fact  human  nature  is  merely  the  principle  of  iden- 
tity or  community  among  men,  and  so  intense,  all- 
pervading,  and  exacting  is  it  that  whatever  be  man's 


private,  individual,  or  spiritual  pretensions  it  will 
insist  first  of  all  upon  holding  him  to  a  perfectly 
rigid  accountability  to  itself,  allowing  no  one  a  spir- 
itual passport  until  he  has  paid  every  jot  or  tittle 
of  his  just  dues  to  men's  natural  brotherhood.*  If 
then  men  possess  a  distinctive  selfhood  or  projmum, 
that  is,  a  private  substance  or  reality  individualizing 
or  differencing  them  one  from  another,  now  in  a 
favorable  sense,  now  in  an  unfavorable,  it  is  clear 
that  the  possession  cannot  be  in  any  case  an  original 
fruit  of  their  nature,  but  of  some  subsequent  Divine 
or  authoritative  modification  of  their  nature.  Now 
the  only  claim  to  be  such  modification  of  human 
nature  is  that  put  forward  by  the  church.  The 
church  unquestionably  and  plausibly  claims  to  be  a 
Divine  institution,  engineered  in  the  express  inten- 
tion of  modifying  human  nature  or  abating  its  in- 
fluence over  its  subjects  with  a  view  to  their  spir- 
itual enfranchisement;  and  there  is  accordingly  no 
shadow  of  a  reason  possible  why  we  should  not 
hold  the  church  liable  by  its  own  showing  for  the 
origination  of  private  selfhood  or  personality  among 

*  That  is  to  say :  nature  is  a  dread  uufaltering  nemesis  to  those 
who  are  in  any  way  ambitious  to  achieve  an  exceptional  personal  holi- 
ness, or  aspire  to  compass  direct  spiritual  relations  with  God  :  relations 
independent  of,  and  uncontrolled  by,  their  previous  natural  obligations 
to  human  society,  fellowship,  or  equality. 


384  CHRISTIANITY  SPIRITUALLY  FULFILLED 

men ;  that  is,  for  their  pretension  to  enjoy  an  indi- 
vidual character,  standing,  and  responsibility  before 
God. 

Now  I  will  not  attempt  to  disguise  my  conviction 
that  this  statement  will  prove  very  offensive  to  two 
large  and  influential  classes  of  persons  among  us ; 
nor  will  I  affect  a  cynical  indifference  to  such  a 
result.  For  the  classes  I  shall  most  offend  embrace 
all  the  conventionally  respectable  people  of  the  earth, 
my  own  humble  friends  and  brethren  among  the 
rest ;  and  it  is  idle  to  pretend  that  one's  own  blood, 
that  is,  one's  conventional  standing,  is  not  dear  to 
him,  or  is  not  very  costly  to  lose.  But  my  humilia- 
tion on  this  account  admits  of  a  striking  alleviation : 
it  is  direcily  in  the  line  of  Christian  tradition.  We 
know  from  the  gospels  that  the  fight  of  Jesus  Christ 
— parva  commoner e  magnis  —  was  with  the  scribes 
and  Pharisees,  that  is,  the  leaders  of  his  people,  or 
those  particularly  identified  with  the  Jewish  church 
and  state.  Now  that  these  were  the  most  respecta- 
ble persons  of  his  nation,  and  naturally  therefore  the 
most  remunerative  to  any  ordinary  man's  self-love, 
is  perhaps  sufficiently  indicated  by  the  fact  of  his 
provoking  their  incurable  pride  and  resentment  in 
professing  to  be  the  special  friend  of  publicans  and 
sinners.  But  we  have  more  direct  evidence  of  their 
untarnished   conventional   respectability.     For  Jesus 


m  THE  EVENTS  OF  OUR  OWN   HISTORY.  385 

Christ  himself  testified  that  the  righteousness  of 
these  men  was  the  highest  righteousness  convention- 
ally recognized  on  earth,  when  he  said  that  even 
that  would  not  qualify  a  man  for  the  skies.  Verily, 
verily,  I  say  unto  you  that  unless  your  riyhteousness 
EXCEED  that  of  the  sc?ides  and  Pharisees,  ye  shall 
171  no  wise  enter  into  the  kingdom  of  heaven.  Now 
I  am  by  no  means  so  presumptuous  as  to  aspire  to 
following  Christ  literally ;  but  I  will  allow  no  man 
—  especially  no  respectable  or  conventionally  right- 
eous man  —  to  deny  me  the  praise  of  following  him 
spiritually.  There  is  no  such  thing  possible  to  men 
nowadays  as  a  literal  following  of  Christ.  This  pre- 
tension had  a  semblance  of  possibility  only  while 
Christ  was  in  the  flesh,  or  lent  himself  in  finite 
visible  form  to  the  tentative  faith  of  his  bewildered 
disciples.  But  even  then  how  continually  did  he 
feel  himself  called  upon  to  bufiet  their  carnal  ideas 
of  his  kingdom  and  authority,  by  summoning  them 
to  a  spiritual  following  !  But  at  this  day  the  voca- 
tion of  following  Christ  literally  has  become  abso- 
lutely too  absurd.  I  think  even  that  it  has  grown 
to  all  modest  minds  a  revolting  and  disreputable 
cant.  For  his  friends  and  his  foes  are  now  both 
alike  spiritual;  being  in  no  wise  friends  or  foes  of 
his  proper  person,  but  only  of  that  Divine  or  infinite 
love  towards  the  human  race  which  he  first  livingly 


386  CHRIST'S  SPIRITUAL  FOES  ARE  THEY 

exhibited  in  such  adequate  or  self-sacrificing  hnea- 
ments  as  to  constitute  him  an  eternal  symbol  or 
revelation  of  God's  name. 

Who  then  are  Christ's  spiritual  foes,  the  only  foes 
possible  to  him  at  this  day?  They  are  friends  — 
in  varying  sort,  some  respectful  and  distant,  others 
attached  and  obsequious — -to  Ids  carnal  or  historic 
personality.  The  first  class  may  for  convenience' 
sake  be  called  moralistic :  being  made  up  of  that 
very  large  number  of  persons  who  live  and  thrive 
in  contentment  with  the  existing  very  infirm  con- 
stitution of  society :  poets,  literary  essayists,  scholars, 
artists,  transcendental  aspirants  or  idealists,  men  of 
science,  men  of  merchandise  and  trade,  men  of  un- 
controlled wealth,  of  idle  lives,  voluptuaries,  in  short 
men  of  whatever  commonplace  habitual  and  enforced 
routine :  all  of  whom  blindly  regard  morality  as  the 
absolute  law  of  human  life,  and  look  upon  duty  as 
the  highest  expression  of  human  character,  especially 
for  other  people. 

The  second  class  is  mainly  ecclesiastical,  of  course, 
and  lives  and  thrives  in  sage  contentment,  not  with 
this  world  to  be  sure,  but  with  another  one  which 
by  all  accounts  is  greatly  more  unequal  or  undivine 
and  vicious  even  than  this.  It  comprises  all  those 
of  every  sect  who  regard  the  traditional  church  as 
directly  in  the  line  of  man's  spiritual  welfare,  or  as 


"WHO   GREATLY  EXALT  HIS  FINITE  PERSON.       387 

supplying  by  Divine  appointment  a  literal  pathway 
to  heaven. 

I  offend  men  of  the  former  category  in  maintaining 
that  morality  is  not  absolute ;  that  is,  that  it  does 
not  constitute  its  own  end  in  the  existing  constitu- 
tion of  things,  but  is  rigidly  subservient  to  a  higher 
style  of  life  in  man  in  which  spontaneity  displaces 
will,  and  duty  succumbs  to  delight. 

I  offend  men  of  the  latter  category  in  maintaining 
that  the  church  is  not  in  a  spiritual  point  of  view 
(however  much  it  may  be  in  a  moral)  directly  min- 
isterial to  human  welfare,  but  only  indirectly  so.  I 
hold  that  the  church  indirectly  promotes  human  wel- 
fare in  the  highest  degree,  indeed,  by  ultimating  or 
bringing  to  a  head  in  her  own  vicious  personality 
the  deepest  spiritual  evils  of  our  nature,  and  so 
affording  the  Divine  providence  an  opportunity  to 
deal  summarily  with  the  evils  in  her  representative 
personality  alone,  instead  of  vaguely  and  indefinitely 
combating  them  in  the  endless  forms  of  our  indi- 
vidual manhood.  But  this  notion  is  of  course  of 
deadly  augury  to  the  ecclesiastical  mind. 

You  see  then  that  the  opposition  between  these 
two  categories  of  thought  and  feeling  and  my  own 
thought  and  feeling  could  hardly  be  more  pro- 
nounced than  it  is ;  and  if  my  reliance  were  not 
solely   in   the  omnipotence  of  truth  I  could  easily 


388  ERROR  IN   POINT  OF   PHILOSOPHY 

despair  of  ever  being  able  by  any  efforts  of  mine 
to  bring  our  discords  into  harmony, 

First  let  us  endeavor  in  an  amicable  spirit  to 
correct  the  error  of  the  moralist,  vv'ho  may  be  called 
thiS'World's  vi^orldling ;  after  which  we  shall  see  what 
can  be  done  to  dispose  of  the  churchman,  who  in 
like  manner  may  be  styled  the  other-world's  world- 
ling. I  deal  with  the  first  of  these  errorists  first, 
because  he  is  altogether  the  easiest  to  deal  with; 
inasmuch  as  moralism  is  a  mere  parasitic  disease 
of  the  mind,  or  has  absolutely  nothing  to  account 
for  its  existence  or  give  it  an  intellectual  locus  standi, 
but  the  development  of  the  church  in  our  nature 
and  history.  That  is  to  say,  the  church  historically 
breeds,  sweats,  or  throws  off  from  its  own  flanks, 
the  civilized  state  of  man;  and  morality  is  the  un- 
questionable law  of  civilization,  the  absolute  sub- 
stance, condition,  and  measure  of  all  our  civic  right- 
eousness. It  is  only  in  recent  years  comparatively, 
while  the  church  as  an  institution  has  been  provi- 
dentially declining  in  men's  estimation,  or  ceasing 
spiritually  to  function,  that  morality  has  been  pro- 
moted to  the  guardianship  of  men's  spiritual  interests 
no  less  than  their  natural.  The  whole  Unitarian 
movement  in  the  church  was  a  development  of  the 
church's  latent  spiritual  stupidity  and  senility,  no 
longer    able  indeed   spiritually   to  discern   between 


OF  THE   MORALIST  OR  STATESMAN":  389 

its  right  hand  and  its  left;  for  what  can  be  more 
hugely  preposterous  than  the  logic  upon  which  that 
movement  was  founded,  namely :  that  one  and  the 
same  law  operated  man's  spiritual  and  material  life  ? 

But  this  is  not  our  immediate  theme.  Our  theme 
at  present  is  the  civic  state  of  man  which  the  Chris- 
tian church  has  bred  and  nurtured,  and  of  which 
morality  is  the  unchangeable  fundamental  law;  and 
we  must  rigidly  cleave  to  it  as  time  and  space  are 
failing  us,  and  both  my  nerves  and  your  patience 
doubtless  are  seriously  pleading  for  a  good  long 
holiday. 

No  evil  attaches  to  man  in  God's  sight  but  the 
evil  of  a  finite  or  infirm  nature,  and  this  is  an  evil 
which  being  natural  attaches  to  all  men  alike  with- 
out distinction  of  persons.  This  natural  or  generic 
evil  of  man  has  various  specific  forms  of  manifesta- 
tion, such  as  false-witness,  theft,  adultery,  murder, 
and  covetousness.  But  under  none  of  these  forms 
does  the  evil  out  of  natural  become  spiritual  in  the 
Divine  sight,  and  attach  to  its  individual  subject, 
unless  the  individual  subject  himself  really  and 
unmistakably  avouch  his  love  for  it:  that  is,  make 
it  his  own  in  heart  as  well  as  in  act,  or  inwardly 
no  less  than  outwardly.  In  that  case  a  man's  adul- 
tery, or  untruth,  or  what  not,  signalizes  a  deeper 
evil  in  him  than  any  which  is  imposed  by  his  na- 


390  THAT  HE  THINKS  CIVILIZATION   BASED 

ture,  namely,  a  spiritual  evil,  which  is  the  evil  of 
a  confirmed  selfhood  or  proprium.  For  no  man  is 
spiritually  hurt  or  degraded  by  subjection  to  any 
form  of  natural  evil,  unless  he  remain  impenitent 
for  it :  that  is,  so  love  the  particular  evil  as  to  make 
it  his  own  or  identify  himself  with  it. 

But  with  spiritual  evil  in  man  we  are  not  called 
upon  to  busy  ourselves  just  here.  We  shall  say 
what  we  have  to  say  about  it  farther  on  when  we 
address  ourselves  to  understanding  the  error  of  the 
churchman.  Just  now  I  have  to  do  with  the  mor- 
alist alone,  who  vehemently  distrusts  me  because  I 
maintain  that  what  we  call  moral  evil  (say  the  evil 
of  false  witness,  theft,  adultery,  or  murder)  does  not 
attach  to  the  moral  subject  in  God's  sight,  unless 
he  be  spiritually  depraved  as  well :  that  is,  make 
self  the  end  of  his  activity  in  preference  to  God  and 
the  neighbor :  but  attaches  to  human  nature  itself. 

The  reason  why  the  man  of  the  world  condemns 
this  doctrine  is  that  it  makes  intellectual  havoc,  if 
it  be  accepted,  with  the  claims  of  our  existing  civ- 
ilization to  be  a  finality  of  the  Divine  administra- 
tion in  human  nature.  Our  civilization  is  based  he 
thinks  upon  the  absoluteness  of  morality,  that  is, 
upon  the  truth  that  a  man's  moral,  or  outward  and 
actual,  relations  to  his  fellow-man  are  of  paramount 
Divine  obligation  upon  him,  and  that  any  contrary 


UPON  THE  ABSOLUTENESS  OF  MORALITY.  391 

idea  to  this  in  weakening  the  foundations  of  civic 
order  would  expose  us  to  the  Divine  judgment.  No 
one  can  doubt  that  a  man's  moral  character  as  good 
or  evil  is  based,  and  based  exclusively,  upon  the 
outward  and  actual  relations  he  sustains  to  society 
or  his  fellow-man :  the  man  being  characteristically 
good  if  he  actually  or  outwardly  abstain  in  his  inter- 
course with  his  kind  from  the  evils  of  lying,  theft, 
adultery,  murder,  and  covetousness,  and  character- 
istically had  if  he  does  not  so  abstain.  But  this 
does  not  prove  by  any  means  that  our  civilization 
is  based  upon  the  absoluteness  of  morality,  or  upon 
the  idea  that  duty  is  the  Divine  ideal  of  human 
action. 

In  the  first  place,  if  morality  were  absolute  in  its 
demands  upon  human  nature,  and  duty  constituted 
the  Divine  ideal  of  human  action,  then  the  teaching 
of  the  church,  and  the  soothing  ministry  of  its  clergy 
at  our  death-beds,  would  be  wholly  out  of  place  in 
civilized  life.  For  civilization  being  based  upon  the 
absoluteness  of  the  moral  sentiment  the  instinct  of 
self-defence  or  its  own  preservation  would  keep  it 
from  tolerating  any  influence  which  went  to  the 
weakening  of  this  sentiment.  But  the  church,  at 
least  the  church  in  its  orthodox  aspect,  is  practi- 
cally the  sworn  foe  of  the  moral  pretension  in  men. 
The  church,  so  long  at  all  events  as  it  witnessed 


392  THE  CHURCH  PRIMARILY  AND 

to  man's  spiritual  life,  allowed  no  moral  differences 
among  men  to  intervene  between  the  soul  and  God, 
or  complicate  the  gospel  blessings  to  universal  man. 
Its  founder  earned  the  odium  of  all  the  morally 
righteous  men  of  his  nation  by  proclaiming  him- 
self the  friend  of  publicans  and  sinners,  and  it 
would  be  indeed  difficult,  nay  impossible  to  dis- 
cover why  his  gospel  w^as  called  a  gospel,  if  it  had 
not  been  addressed  primarily  to  the  special  rehef 
of  those  who  had  a  conscience  of  sin  towards  God 
only  because  they  had  violated  the  law  upon  which 
their  national  dignity  was  founded.  And  the  apos- 
tles of  Christ  emulating  the  teaching  of  their  mas- 
ter, and  inspired  by  him,  everywhere  instructed  the 
awakened  conscience  of  their  Jewish  converts  that 
what  the  law  notoriously  could  not  do  in  that  it  icas 
weak  through  the  flesh :  namely,  beget  a  man  to 
spiritual  peace  and  hope  in  God :  this  the  gospel 
infallibly  did,  and  thereby  avouched  its  eternal 
supremacy  to  the  law  as  a  mode  of  intercourse 
between  man  and  God.  It  is  idle  then  for  the 
moralist  to  appeal  to  the  church  for  confirmation 
to  his  doctrine  that  morality  is  the  absolute  law  of 
human  life,  or  furnishes  an  adequate  rule  to  the 
soul  in  its  aspirations  after  spiritual  life.  For  the 
church,  so  long  as  it  continued  to  be  worthy  of  its 
name  in  the  Divine  sight,  and  evinced  such  worthi- 


INVETERATELY  HOSTILE  TO   MORALISM.  393 

ness  by  providentially  succeeding  to  the  inheritance 
of  the  Roman  empire,  always  persisted  in  stigma- 
tizing that  doctrine  as  of  especially  treacherous  au- 
gury to  the  Christian  tradition  upon  which  its  own 
fortunes  were  founded. 

The  truth  is  that  the  theoretic  moralist  is  totally 
out  of  place  in  this  spiritual  day  and  generation : 
as  much  out  of  place  as  an  owl  or  a  bat  would  be 
after  natural  daybreak.  His  visual  organs  served 
him  excellently  well  during  the  spiritual  night  of 
the  mind  to  discriminate  between  moonhght  or  star- 
light and  shade;  but  now  that  the  full  splendor 
of  spiritual  daylight  is  inwardly  bursting  upon  the 
soul  they  are  of  no  avail  but  to  make  him  a 
laughing-stock  to  the  unsympathetic  or  unfeeling. 
He  insists  upon  holding  natural  daylight  and  spir- 
itual to  be  one  and  the  same  thing,  or  of  one  and 
the  same  essential  quality  though  admitting  of  quan- 
titative differences ;  and  consequently  does  not  see 
that  they  require  different  visual  organs  for  their 
discernment :  one  exclusively  outward  or  material, 
the  other  exclusively  inward  or  rational.  What 
originally  stultifies  our  belated  critic  and  friend, 
and  makes  him  spiritually  so  owlish  or  bat-like  in 
appearance,  is  the  fixed  idea  with  him  that  creation 
is  primarily  natural,  and  spiritual  only  by  derivation 
from  that.     Whereas,  the  spiritual  truth  would  teach 


394  THE  LATEST   CHURCH  DEVELOPMENT 

him,  if  he  were  only  willing  to  receive  it,  that  our 
heing  is  altogether  spiritual  or  real,  while  it  is  our 
mere  superficial  or  supposititious  existence  alone 
which  is  natural  or  phenomenal.  Still  it  is  vastly 
better  for  the  moralist  to  cling  to  his  fixed  idea 
of  creation  being  originally  natural,  than  it  would 
be  for  him  to  abandon  it  save  at  the  instance  of 
the  spiritual  truth  upon  the  subject.  For  in  that 
case  he  would  be  left  destitute  of  all  reverence  for 
the  Divine  name  even  as  an  outward  power,  and 
sink  rapidly  into  the  condition  of  a  mere  spiritual 
tramp  and  vagabond  preying  remorselessly  upon  the 
peace,  order,  and  innocence  of  civilized  mankind. 

But  all  men  in  this  day  of  the  church's  spiritual 
imbecility  are  more  or  less  moralistic.  The  Uni- 
tarian or  latest  form  of  church  development  which 
represents  the  church  in  its  vastated  spiritual  plight 
more  faithfully  than  is  at  all  agreeable  to  the  or- 
thodox imagination,  has  pushed  moralism  so  far  as 
to  have  almost  openly  declined,  itself,  into  a  mere 
school  of  good  manners,  while  the  orthodox  congre- 
gations by  a  necessary  reaction  have  been  driven  to 
contra-distinguish  themselves  by  a  gospel  of  fervent 
but  puerile  ritualism.  Thus  between  the  "  world  " 
and  the  "church"  the  only  discernible  spiritual  dif- 
ference is  that  while  the  former  continues  to  be 
seriously   moralistic    in    its    doctrinal    beliefs   as   to 


PROVES  ITS  UTTER  SPIRITUAL  DECEASE.  395 

another  life,  the  latter  grows  more  and  more  frivo- 
lously so.  The  consequence  is  that  the  church  tra- 
dition of  God's  spiritual  or  creative  infinitude  is 
now  practically  discredited  and  as  it  were  discarded 
among  men,  and  the  great  creator  of  men  has 
accordingly  sunk  into  a  mere  moral  pedagogue  or 
schoolmaster  intent  upon  publicly  vindicating  his 
own  paltry  self-consequence  by  rewarding  his  friends 
and  punishing  his  enemies.  It  is  rare  indeed  to 
meet  with  any  one  who,  speculatively  at  least,  does 
not  look  upon  our  shabby  moral  history  as  a  source 
of  legitimate  pride  to  us  rather  than  humility ; 
who  does  not  regard  conscience  as  designedly  a 
ministry  of  righteousness  rather  than  sin,  of  justi- 
fication not  of  condemnation,  of  life  not  death;  and 
who  is  not  unfeignedly  surprised  therefore  when 
any  sincere  votary  of  it  is  found  incurring  death 
at  its  hands.  There  is  doubtless  good  ground  for 
surprise,  and  even  shock,  when  any  one  of  assured 
civic  standing,  enjoying  the  esteem  of  his  fellow-citi- 
zens, turns  out  so  wantonly  imprudent  as  to  violate 
the  moral  law,  and  expose  himself  to  men's  reproach. 
Imprudent,  I  allow,  even  to  the  pitch  of  insanity 
every  such  man  must  be;  but  there  is  no  need 
of  imputing  the  least  spiritual  turpitude  to  him. 
Falsehood,  fraud,  adultery,  murder,  covetousness,  are 
vices  exclusively  of  our  moral  or  voluntary  constitu- 


396  OUR  HIGHEST  MORALITY  CLAIMS 

tion ;  and  a  liability  to  them  therefore  does  not  any 
more  argue  spiritual  depravity  in  a  man,  than  a  lia- 
bility to  small-pox,  which  is  a  vice  of  our  physical 
constitution,  argues  moral  depravity.  Many  a  violator 
of  the  law  moreover  suffers  so  poignant  a  sense  of 
guilt  as  to  be  willing  even  —  if  that  were  possible  — 
to  give  his  life  a  ransom  for  his  offence.  And  clearly 
the  spiritual  state  of  such  a  man  is  infinitely  more 
hopeful  than  that  of  any  person,  who  himself  as  yet 
undrilled  or  inexperienced  in  the  deadly  letter  of  the 
law,  and  grossly  ignorant  therefore  of  its  redeeming 
spirit,  triumphs  over  him,  or  withdraws  his  fellowship 
from  him. 

In  fact  human  nature  has  so  inward,  so  spiritual, 
so  living  a  root  in  the  infinite  mercy  of  God,  that 
the  average  man  does  not  find  it  easy  to  obey  an 
outward  law,  a  law  which  aims  to  regulate  his  in- 
tercourse with  others.  No  one  seems  able  to  do  so 
sincerely  who  does  not  do  it  on  religious  grounds; 
that  is,  who  does  not  put  a  great  deal  of  conscience 
towards  God  into  his  conformity,  and  obey  chiefly  for 
his  soul's  sake.  Other  people  do  not  necessarily  dis- 
obey it  by  any  means,  but  their  apparent  conformity 
to  it  is  in  reality  a  conformity  to  something  else. 
We  all  of  us  well-to-do-people  for  example  habit- 
ually maintain  a  good  moral  repute  in  the  community, 
but  then  it  is  by  virtue  of  the  prudential  instinct 


NO  HIGHER  SANCTION  THAN  PRUDENCE.  397 

in  US,  or  an  ever  active  self-love.  We  are  kept,  the 
mass  of  us,  honest,  chaste,  and  gentle  because  it  is 
our  interest  to  be  vv^ell-esteemed  by  our  fellow-men. 
The  esteem  of  others  is  so  dear  to  me,  for  instance, 
that  I  could  almost  die  rather  than  do  anything  vol- 
untarily to  impair  my  conventional  standing ;  at  all 
events  my  children's.  But  what  I  mean  when  I  say 
that  no  one  sincerely  obeys  the  moral  law  but  by  the 
grace  of  God,  is  that  no  one  is  capable  of  giving  it 
a  hearty  allegiance,  a  spontaneous  or  disinterested 
obedience,  until  the  force  of  selfhood  in  him  is  effect- 
ually broken  and  routed.  And  this  consideration 
ought  by  the  way  to  be  allowed  much  more  weight 
in  all  questions  of  practical  casuistry  than  we  usually 
concede  to  it.  It  is  not  enough  to  stamp  a  man  a 
liar  to  a  spiritual  regard  that  he  should  have  told 
a  lie  on  a  certain  occasion  ;  nor  a  thief,  an  adulterer,  a 
murderer  that  he  should  have  committed  the  offences 
designated  by  those  names.  For  these  offences  are 
for  the  most  part  committed  inadvertently,  that  is, 
in  utter  ignorance  of  their  spiritual  quality;  what 
is  really  false  in  them,  or  fraudulent,  or  adulterous, 
or  murderous,  being  so  obscured  and  swallowed  up 
for  the  time  by  their  subtle  and  extreme  agreeable- 
ness  to  sense,  as  to  seem  an  actual  good.  And  surely 
men  will  forgive  any  weakness  to  the  average  human 
will,  when  it  is  thus  placed  in  hand-to-hand  conflict 


398  MORAL  OFFENCES  NOT  CONTRARY 

with  the  tremendous  force  of  the  physical  organiza- 
tion on  the  one  side,  and  is  unbacked  on  the  otlier 
by  a  hving  faith  in  God.  For  my  own  part,  and  I 
do  not  know  that  I  fall  below  the  moral  average  of 
men,  I  have  always  found  myself  thoroughly  impotent, 
f  when  tempted,  to  overcome  evil  simply  as  evil ;  and 
for  this  excellent  reason,  that  when  I  have  been 
tempted  by  evil  it  was  never  under  its  own  linea- 
ments, but  always  in  the  counterfeit  guise  of  good : 
so  that  my  only  chance  to  avoid  it  lay  at  last  in  giving 
submissive  heed  to  the  voice  of  my  religious  con- 
science, which  tells  me  that  whatsoever  the  flesh 
reckons  to  be  supremely  good  is  ipso  facto  spiritually 
evil. 

I  say  emphatically :  when  tempted ;  observe  that. 
There  are  very  many  persons  who  will  not  understand 
this  limitation  —  their  number  seems  indeed  to  be 
growing;  at  least  I  think  it  could  never  have  been 
so  great  as  now  —  inasmuch  as  they  themselves  are 
exempt  from  moral  conflict,  and  do  not  know  except 
from  hearsay  what  false-witness,  or  theft,  or  adultery, 
or  murder  is.  These  persons  exhibit  a  great  natural 
advance  upon  the  average  man,  being  of  an  almost 
purely  aesthetic  turn,  with  the  ordinary  moral  virus 
all  left  out.  Of  course  they  know  very  well  what  is 
signified  to  the  ear  by  the  off'ences  in  question,  but 
they  have  no  idea  of  the  spiritual  substance  which 


TO  NATURE  BUT  TO  CULTURE.  399 

is  covered  by  them.  They  suppose  that  false-witness 
and  theft  and  adultery  and  murder  are  not  only  so 
many  literal  words  but  so  many  veritable  thin(]s  as 
well,  physically  determined;  which  a  vulgar  sort  of 
people  are  prone  to  do,  but  to  which  they  themselves 
have  not  only  no  leaning,  but  a  marked  distaste  and 
repugnance. 

But  this  in  my  opinion  is  a  very  superficial  judg- 
ment. West  pas  pecheur  qui  veut.  No  such  thing 
is  known  to  nature  as  false-witness,  as  theft,  as  adul- 
tery, or  murder ;  otherwise  of  course  animals  might 
incur  guilt.  And  surely  no  well-wisher  of  these  could 
desire  to  see  their  innocent  life  converted  into  a  moral 
and  rational  one.  The  offences  in  question  are  not 
the  least  physical,  as  against  nature,  but  strictly 
moral,  as  against  culture.  They  characterize  man 
not  as  he  stands  inwardly  affected  to  the  interests 
of  Divine  justice  in  the  earth,  or  the  evolution  of 
human  society ;  but  as  he  stands  outwardly  related 
to  a  strictly  factitious  or  conventional  order  of  human 
life  which  is  called  the  State,  and  to  which  he  is  born 
subject:  and  they  have  no  shadow  of  philosophic 
pertinency  but  in  application  to  such  subjection  on 
his  part.  In  other  words  the  terms  indicate  so  many 
strictly  instituted  or  Icyal  offences  of  men :  the  tem- 
porary order  of  which  they  confess  themselves  viola- 
tions having  been  providentially  instituted,  not  with 


400  MEANING  OF  OUR 

any  view  to  bound  men's  aspirations,  or  define  their 
just  hopes  and  expectations  towards  God,  but  rather 
with  a  view  to  foreshadow  a  permanent  or  Divine- 
natural  order  of  human  Ufe  one  day  to  appear  in 
the  earth,  and  by  the  insufRciences  of  the  present 
order  gradually  prepare  them  for  it.  In  short  the 
existing  order  of  human  life  is  essentially  educative 
or  disciplinary :  its  whole  practical  purpose  being  to 
lead  the  mind  out  of  carnal  into  spiritual  ideas  of 
justice  or  righteousness ;  or  what  is  the  same  thing 
out  of  selfish  into  social  conceptions  of  human  life. 

I  repeat  then  that  false-witness,  theft,  adultery, 
murder,  and  covetousness  are  not  the  least  physical 
offences,  or  offences  against  nature,  but  purely  moral 
offences,  or  offences  against  law.  They  are  vices  of 
our  civic  constitution  exclusively,  and  therefore  be- 
long quite  equally  to  all  the  subjects  of  that  consti- 
tution, if  not  actually  yet  potentially :  in  which  case 
of  course  we  have  none  of  us  any  more  right  to  boast 
ourselves  inwardly  over  our  neighbor  in  respect  to 
moral  purity,  than  we  have  a  right  to  boast  ourselves 
outwardly  over  him  in  respect  to  physical  health. 
And  if  you,  dear  friend,  ask  me  hereupon  to  state 
more  explicitly  what  I  mean  by  our  civic  constitu- 
tion, I  will  do  so  with  all  necessary  fulness  and  dis- 
patch. 

By  our  civic  constitution  I  mean  the  form  of  public 


CIVIC  CONSTITUTION.  401 

order  under  which  you  and  I  have  always  lived,  and 
which  is  called  civilization,  because  it  suspends  every 
man's  consideration  upon  the  relation  he  voluntarily 
sustains  to  the  State,  regarded  as  the  power  of  a 
present  Divine  life  in  the  world,  in  opposition  to  the 
Church,  which  claims  to  be  the  power  of  a  future 
Divine  life.  This  antagonism  between  Church  and 
State  was  never  indeed  overt  or  pronounced  till  after 
the  Reformation;  but  it  was  always  latent,  because 
the  Church  in  spite  of  her  pedigree  always  bore  the 
State  in  her  flanks,  and  nursed  it  to  maturity ;  and 
the  child  is  bound  to  inherit  of  the  parent,  or  thrive 
by  the  latter 's  decline  and  decease.  It  is  only  now 
in  our  own  day  accordingly  when  they  both  feel  the 
hand  of  doom  upon  them,  and  are  reluctantly  pre- 
paring to  be  swallowed  up  in  the  long-promised  reign 
of  God's  JUSTICE  upon  earth,  that  they  abandon  them- 
selves to  unlovely  but  well-merited  mutual  recrimi- 
nation, and  would  literally  fly  —  if  they  were  not  all 
the  while  mere  shadows  devoid  of  human  substance 
—  at  each  other's  vicious  throat.  But  the  ideal  of 
the  State  however  faithless  the  State  itself  has  been 
to  it,  is  to  make  men  good  citizens,  or  reproduce 
upon  an  enduring  basis  their  lost  paradise ;  while 
that  of  the  church,  however  little  she  herself  has 
practically  exemplified  the  influence  of  her  ideal,  has 
always  been  to  make  men  saints,  or  show  them  para- 


402  IT  IS  A  MERE  STEWARD 

dise  well  lost  for  heaven.  And  there  can  be  no  doubt 
as  to  which  of  these  ideals  is  most  likely  in  the  long 
run  to  captivate  men's  imagination,  especially  as  the 
chm-ch's  practice  has  always  supplied  so  exquisitely 
inverse  a  commentary  upon  its  preaching. 

Understand  then :  civilization  all  unconsciously  to 
itself  yet  aims  at  the  practical  secularization  of  marts 
religious  conscience,  or  his  hope  towards  God.  But  its 
method  is  hopelessly  infirm  and  imbecile  because  it 
has,  to  begin  with,  no  adequate  conception  of  human 
nature  and  human  destiny.  It  is  in  truth  a  mere 
steward  of  humanity,  and  has  never  had  the  least 
pretension  to  be  taken  into  its  counsels  or  to  direct 
its  fortunes.  Thus  it  assumes  without  misgiving  that 
man  is  by  nature  or  creation  a  moral  and  rational 
force,  not  at  all  perceiving  that  it  thereby  denies  him 
all  generic  or  race  quality.  If  man  be  an  essentially 
moral  and  rational  existence,  that  is  to  say,  a  subject 
primarily  of  truth  in  his  understanding,  then  it  is 
plainly  impossible  that  he  should  ever  attain  to  uni- 
versal form  or  realize  his  social  destiny :  inasmuch 
as  that  is  to  be  led  primarily  by  good  in  his  heart, 
and  only  derivatively  by  truth  in  his  understanding. 
And  to  make  a  universal  consciousness  impossible  on 
man's  part,  is  really  to  deny  the  creative  infinitude 
and  heap  practical  contempt  upon  it.  The  truth  is 
we  are  moral  and  rational  only  because  we  have  not 


OF  MAN'S  SPIRITUAL  DESTINY.  403 

yet  intellectually  realized  our  nature  or  spiritual  crea- 
tion, but  stupidly  insist  on  the  contrary  upon  iden- 
tifying it  with  our  vulgar  and  pragmatical  selves. 
Undoubtedly  we  are  the  creation  of  infinite  love  and 
wisdom,  but  we  are  this  only  in  our  generic  or  uni- 
versal, and  not  the  least  in  our  specific  or  private, 
capacity.  But  there  is  just  as  little  doubt  that  to 
be  the  creature  of  infinitude  is  existential!^  to  be  a 
finite  form  of  will  and  understanding ;  because  with- 
out such  limitation  the  infinite  substance  could  have 
no  fulcrum  or  point  ctappui  in  the  created  conscious- 
ness whereby  to  operate  its  universal  results.  Never- 
theless we  are  not  authorized  to  confound  what  is 
strictly  existential  to  a  thing  with  what  is  properly 
essential  to  it.  And  yet  this  is  what  civilization 
habitually  does.  For  what  is  properly  essential  to 
man  is  his  nature  as  a  creature  of  infinitude,  since 
without  it  he  could  not  as  a  race,  or  absolutely,  he: 
and  what  is  strictly  existential  to  him  is  his  private 
selfhood  or  conscious  distinction  from  all  other  exist- 
ence, since  without  this  he  could  not  contingently 
exist  or  appear.  Now  civilization  confounds  this 
merely  personal  or  existential  element  in  human  ex- 
perience with  its  natural  or  essential  element;  and 
consequently  makes  our  nature,  which  in  its  last 
analysis  is  Divine  and  immaculate,  the  stalking-horse 
of  all  our  immeasurable  personal  folly  and  corruption. 


404  IT  UTTERLY  MISAPPREHENDS 

Starting  with  this  monstrously  inadequate  concep- 
tion of  what  man  is  by  nature  or  creation,  the  method 
which  civihzation  employs  to  effect  its  own  compara- 
tively low  ends,  or  make  men  good  citizens,  cannot 
help  proving  signally  inefficient.  For  regarding  man 
as  an  essentially  rational  and  moral  force,  whose  heart 
is  firmly  bound  to  the  allegiance  of  his  head,  and 
whose  normal  activity  consequently  is  voluntary  not 
spontaneous,  calculated  not  free,  it  seeks  to  accomplish 
its  ends  with  men  by  an  appeal  to  their  prudence 
mainly :  that  is,  through  the  pressure  of  an  instituted 
order  and  decency,  or  one  which  is  guaranteed  in 
the  last  resort  not  by  the  inward  consent  of  the 
subject,  but  by  the  outward  force  of  the  community. 
In  other  words,  it  utterly  excludes  from  its  horizon 
any  social  or  distinctively  r^ce-destiny  for  man,  and 
would  doubtless  freely  commute  that  heavenly  birth- 
right any  day  for  whatever  steaming  and  savory 
mess  of  pottage  might  be  complacently  proffered  us 
by  political  economy.  Thus  civihzation  is  organized 
upon  the  truth  of  an  absolute  or  unconditioned  self- 
hood in  man,  instead  of  a  rigidly  phenomenal  or 
provisional  one ;  and  hence  it  regards  him  not  as  a 
typical  or  shadowy  and  unsubstantial  person,  literally 
masking  an  infinite  reality,  but  as  a  strictly  real  or 
secular  and  finite  tldng,  rightly  and  rigidly  amenable 
to  all  other  things  for  the  good  and  evil  consequences 


ITS  PROVIDENTIAL  FUNCTION.  405 

which  inhere  in  his  actions.  T  am  sure  then  that 
you,  good  friend,  will  justify  the  indictment  I  bring 
against  our  existing  order  —  the  merely  instituted 
decency,  the  merely  leffal  justice  or  righteousness 
under  which  we  have  been  sheltered  all  these  cen- 
turies —  when  I  say  that  it  stays  itself  mainly  upoo 
self-love  and  worldly  prudence  in  its  votary  as  his 
ruling  principles  of  action,  and  hence  not  only  specu- 
latively ignores  his  spiritual  nature  or  social  destiny, 
but  systematically  obstructs  and  resists  its  providen- 
tial evolution,  by  practically  authenticating  all  the 
baser,  and  outlawing  all  the  more  generous,  attributes 
of  humanity. 

The  mistake  has  been  unavoidable.  Men  do  not 
know  their  own  nature  as  determined  primarily  by 
their  creator,  that  is,  as  pre-eminently  spiritual  or 
social;  but  only  as  determined  by  themselves,  that 
is,  as  pre-eminently  personal  or  selfish ;  and  hence 
they  lend  themselves  without  scruple  to  the  enforced 
conventional  order  of  human  life  represented  by  priest 
and  king,  and  embodied  in  the  institutions  of  Church 
and  State.  And  the  reason  why  we  thus  inevitably 
conceive  our  nature  to  be  determined  by  ourselves 
and  not  by  our  creator  is,  that  creation  itself,  spirit- 
ually viewed,  means  the  actual  transfiguration  of  the 
created  nature  by  the  plenary  creative  perfection, 
neither  more  nor  less;  and  hence  can  only  report 


406  THE  SPIRITUAL  FORM  OF  OUR 

itself  intelligibly  or  credibly  to  the  creature  in  so  far 
as  he  feels  toitJiin  himself  a  life  or  spirit  truly  Divine : 
and  notoriously  we  as  a  general  thing  have  been 
utterly  void  of  such  life  or  spirit.  The  nearest  ap- 
proach we  have  ever  made  to  it  has  been  purely 
formal  and  picturesque,  consisting  in  the  unaffected 
reverence  we  have  hitherto  paid  —  a  reverence  which 
at  this  day,  and  especially  in  this  land,  has  become 
purely  wilful  and  superstitious  —  to  certain  traditional 
institutions,  such  as  the  altar  and  the  throne,  under 
which  the  creative  energy  has  always  masked  or 
accommodated  itself  to  our  carnal  and  stupid  recog- 
nition. And  now  that  a  bumptious  but  providential 
and  inexorable  science  is  fast  robbing  these  hoary 
institutions  of  their  absolute  sanctity,  and  reducing 
them  to  a  relative  or  representative  worth  at  most, 
all  those  of  us  who  are  intellectually  honest  will  be 
obliged,  henceforth,  either  to  accept  creation  exclu- 
sively as  a  living  or  spiritual  truth  falling  primarily 
within  the  compass  of  our  generic  or  race  conscious- 
ness, and  only  derivatively  thence  within  that  of  the 
private  consciousness :  or  else  to  reject  it  altogether. 

The  spiritual  form  of  nature  or  creation  —  its  form 
as  determined  by  God,  is  constituted  by  what  we  call 
SOCIETY ;  meaning  by  that  word  not  any  merely  em- 
pirical or  tentative  order  of  human  life,  such  as  we 
are  now  groaning  and  stifling  under,  but  the  essential 


NATURE  OR  CREATION  IS  SOCIAL.  407 

brotherhood,  fellowship,  equality  of  each  man  with  all 
men,  and  all  men  with  each,  in  God.  For  inasmuch 
as  by  the  exigency  of  His  perfect  love  God  is  essen- 
tialhj  creative,  or  finds  His  proper  life  only  in  com- 
municating Himself  to  what  is  not  Himself,  to  what- 
soever in  fact  is  in  se  most  opposite  and  repugnant 
to  Himself,  the  nature  of  His  creature  in  order  to 
reflect  such  love  must  be  supremely  social;  since 
society  alone  enables  us  naturally  to  love  others  as 
we  love  ourselves,  and  even  more  than  we  love  our- 
selves. If  God's  love  be  essentially  creative  as  freely 
endowing  others  created  from  itself  with  its  own  life 
or  being,  then  it  must  also  be  essentially  social — as 
finding  all  its  own  felicity  in  the  creature's  receptivity 
to  its  advances.  And  if  the  absolute  life  or  being 
we  have  in  our  creator  be  social,  then  it  follows  that 
the  mere  contingent  or  incidental  existence  Ave  have 
in  ourselves,  however  egregiously  unsocial  it  may  for 
a  time  appear,  is  necessarily  tributary  to  that  being, 
and  must  infallibly  tend  in  the  long  run  to  avouch 
and  reproduce  it. 

But  obviously  this  social  or  regenerate  tendency 
in  our  nature  cannot  be  fully  constituted,  cannot  be 
livingly  or  spiritually  realized  by  us,  save  in  so  far 
as  we  shall  have  practically  renounced  —  save  in  so 
far  as  we  shall  have  cordially  lived  down,  so  to  speak 
—  our  selfish  or  gregarious  instincts.     This  renun- 


408  ^5UT  WE  ARE  BORN  DESPERATELY 


ciation  accordingly  has  been  the  one  great  lesson  of 
God's  providence  to  us  in  all  the  dreary  past.  To 
this  end  alone  prophets  have  taught,  priests  minis- 
tered, and  magistrates  borne  rule.  We  have  been 
extremely  slow  to  learn  no  doubt,  yet  millions  of  men 
see  to-day  what  but  a  handful  saw  a  century  ago, 
namely  -.  that  civilization  has  had  no  other  providen- 
tial mission  than  gradually  to  socialize  the  human 
consciousness,  by  thoroughly  demonstrating  the  vanity 
of  all  human  pretension,  the  vice  that  is  latent  in  all 
our  virtue,  the  selfseeking  that  underlies  and  arms  our 
fiercest  piety,  the  love  of  dominion  that  animates  our 
loving-kindness  even,  and  turns  it  often  to  cruel  tyr- 
anny. In  fact  our  historic  past  has  apparently  existed 
for  no  higher  providential  end  than  to  make  manifest 
the  evil  which  is  latent  in  the  finite  selfhood,  and  so 
prepare  a  permanent  foundation  in  experience  for 
human  society.  The  evil  thus  latent  is  commensurate 
in  quantity  and  quality  with  the  infinite  Divine  good- 
ness :  because  it  is  really  that  in  substance,  though 
formally  perverted  by  a  finite  recipiency;  and  no 
diviner  mercy  could  befall  us  consequently  than  to 
allow  it  to  be  played  out  betimes  in  all  its  hideous 
malignity.  Every  thoughtful  parent  knows  the  philo- 
sophic value  of  this  principle  of  the  mamfestation  of 
evil  in  the  education  of  his  children.  For  every  child 
upon  earth  is  liable  to  inherit  evil  dispositions  with 


UNSOCIAL  OR  SELFISH.  409 

his  blood ;  and  nothing  could  be  more  impoverishing 
and  indeed  fatal  to  his  manhood,  in  so  far  as  his 
manhood  is  contingent  upon  a  true  self-knowledge, 
than  that  these  dispositions  should  be  violently  sup- 
pressed by  parental  rigor,  instead  of  being  allowed 
to  manifest  themselves  in  the  gristle,  and  so  become 
tenderly  corrected. 

This  letter  outrages  all  bounds,  I  know,  my  friend, 
but  I  must  make  it  still  more  tedious  by  a  word  of 
additional  appeal  to  you.  I  want  you  definitely  to 
understand,  then,  as  the  upshot  substantially  of  all 
I  have  said,  that  selfhood  or  personal  consciousness, 
though  it  is  doubtless  perfectly  implied  in  our  spiritual 
creation  as  stem  is  implied  in  rose,  is  yet  not  our 
creation  any  more  than  stem  is  rose  —  any  more  even 
than  the  base  earth  out  of  which  the  stem  itself  grows, 
is  the  stem.  It  has  always  been  our  supreme  infatu- 
ation to  regard  it  in  that  deceptive  hght;  to  look 
upon  it  as  an  all-sufficient  exjMcaiion  of  creation,  and 
not  as  a  mere  abject  implication  of  it.  By  thus  sys- 
tematically identifying  oiu-  spiritual  creation  with  our 
preposterous  and  idiotic  selves,  the  personal  preten- 
sion within  us  becomes  so  inflamed  and  inflated  out 
of  its  normal  provisional  dimensions,  as  to  insist  upon 
being  no  longer  base  but  superstructure  to  our  nature, 
and  to  require  accordingly  the  most  deadly  machinery 
of  morality  to  keep  us  each  from  turning  out  a  fla- 


410  THE  PERSONAL  ILLUSION 

grant  nuisance  to  every  other.  We  have  been  taught 
from  time  immemorial  by  our  pastors  and  governors, 
that  we  are  each  of  us  a  direct  creature  of  God,  a 
vahd  creation  in  our  own  personal  or  private  right, 
and  not  by  virtue  exclusively  of  our  natural  solidarity 
with  our  kind.  And  this  illusion  breeds  such  un- 
wholesome mists  of  vanity  in  our  breasts,  and  such 
dense  clouds  of  error  in  our  understanding,  that  the 
heat  of  God's  love  and  the  light  of  His  truth  have  at 
last  lost  all  power  to  penetrate  our  indurated  moral 
hides ;  and  the  entire  spiritual  world  consequently  — 
the  world  of  our  true  being,  of  what  ought  to  be  oiu* 
undefiled  and  unshackled  commerce  with  God  and 
man  —  necessarily  takes  on  a  divided  aspect,  or  re- 
solves itself  as  it  were  in  spite  of  the  creative  unity, 
and  by  a  sheer  instinct  of  self-preservation,  into  two 
hemispheres  of  good  and  evil  respectively,  or  heaven 
and  hell :  the  former  a  realm  of  ever  active  inward 
association  or  assimilation  between  the  Divine  and 
human  natures ;  the  latter  a  realm  of  ever  active  out- 
ward waste  or  elimination,  by  which  all  things  per- 
manently incommensurate  with  the  created  form, 
because  alien  to  the  creative  substance,  may  be  grad- 
ually brought  to  the  surface  of  consciousness,  and 
so  definitively  sloughed  off.  And  I  for  my  part  am 
perfectly  persuaded  that  if  the  stupendous  illusion 
of  moral  responsibility,  or  a  private  selfhood  in  man 


SOLE  EOOT  OF  HELL  IN  US.  ^H 

adequate  to  the  highest  wants  of  his  nature,  had  not 
been  thus  utihzed  spiritually,  by  being  made  the  base 
of  a  quasi  Divine  life  in  the  earth,  or  a  ^jrovisional 
kingdom  of  God  in  human  affairs,  ichich  might  at 
least  correspondentially  reflect  and  inaugurate  the  true 
and  permanent  things  of  creative  order,  om*  minds 
could  never  have  become  —  as  they  have  now  be- 
come—  enlarged  and  disciplined  to  the  discernment 
of  spiritual  truth. 

The  moralist  then,  as  it  seems  to  me,  is  very  fairly 
answered.  His  error  consists  in  maintaining  the 
absoluteness  of  om'  moral  judgments,  and  this  error 
I  think  I  have  sufficiently  demonstrated  by  showing 
that  our  moral  experience,  in  place  of  being  abso- 
lute, has  been  rigidly  subservient  in  the  miraculous 
wisdom  of  God  to  a  superior  providential  end : 
which  is,  first,  the  manifestation  through  the  church 
of  living  or  spiritual  evil,  the  evil  of  confirmed  self- 
hood or  self-righteousness,  in  men's  natural  person- 
ality ;  and  then  through  that  again,  the  definite 
rescue  of  our  race-consciousness  from  the  dominion 
of  such  evil,  in  its  own  reduction  to  social  form 
and  order.  Let  us  then  leave  the  moralist,  and 
hasten  with  what  speed  we  may  to  consider  the 
opposition  of  the  churchman :  so  bringing  our  some- 
what protracted  labor  to  its  natural  close. 


LETTER    XXVI. 


f^yteT^Y  DEAR  FRIEND :  It  is  the  idea  of  the 
morahst,  as  we  saw  in  our  last  letter,  that 
civilization  is  an  absolute  end '  of  God's 
earthly  providence.  But  I  have  endeav- 
ored to  show  you  that  it  is  a  wholly  mediate  and 
subordinate  end,  being  strictly  contingent  for  its  own 
development  upon  the  manifestation  of  the  Divine 
good-will  to  universal  man,  or,  what  is  the  same 
thing,  the  revelation  of  the  Divine  infinitude  or 
omnipotence  in  our  nature,  and  bovmd  therefore  to 
disappear  whenever  the  necessary  machinery  of  such 
manifestation  allows  the  Divine  omnipotence  to  be- 
come visibly  or  actively  efficient  in  human  affairs. 

The  misconception  of  the  churchman  with  respect 
to  God's  heavenly  counsels  is  strikingly  analogous  in 
point  of  form  to  this  of  the  moralist  with  respect  to 
His  earthly  counsels ;  but  it  is  vastly  more  serious 
and  alarming  in  point  of  substance,  since  a  mistake 
in   earthly   things   is   of  comparatively   no   moment 


MORALIST  AND  CHURCHMAN  DEFINED.  413 

beside  a  mistake  in  heavenly  or  Divine  things.  The 
churchman  conceives  that  the  Divine  love  for  man 
is  fitly  or  perfectly  exjpressed  in  the  re(/eneratio7i  of 
individuals :  and  this  although  it  is  evident  that  every 
case  of  individual  regeneration  is  effected  at  the  cost 
of  a  proportionate  ^t^generation  and  degradation  to 
other  individuals. 

The  moralist,  stupid  soul  that  he  is  !  foolishly  as- 
sumes that  because  he  himself  is  inwardly  content 
with  our  existing  order,  although  that  order  be  stayed 
upon  any  amount  of  force,  or  necessarily  involve  in 
itself  a  huge  infernal  enginery  of  bayonets,  prisons, 
dungeons,  and  scaffolds  to  give  it  permanence,  there- 
fore God  most  high  must  be  inwardly  content  with  it 
also. 

In  like  manner  precisely  the  churchman  —  because 
his  own  social  sympathy,  or  sense  of  fellowship  with 
his  kind,  is  so  shallow  as  not  to  be  scandalized  by 
the  thought  of  himself  being  declared  righteous  and 
blessed,  while  other  men  exactly  as  good  as  he  by 
nature,  and  very  much  better  perhaps  than  he  by 
actual  culture,  are  remorselessly  cast  out  of  the 
Divine  favor  —  just  as  foolishly  assumes,  self-right- 
eous soul  that  he  at  heart  is  !  that  a  state  of  things 
so  flagrantly  irrational  and  inequitable  cannot  be 
otherwise  than  eternally  grateful  to  the  pure  heart 
of  God  also. 


414  THE  ROOT-ERROR  IN  BOTH  THE  SAME, 

It  is  plain  then  that  the  error  of  both  these  men 
has  one  and  the  same  root :  the  infatuation  of  pro- 
prium  or  selfhood ;  only  with  the  moralist  the  infatu- 
ation is  venial,  as  being  addressed  to  the  selfhood 
naturally  regarded;  while  w^ith  the  churchman  it  is 
fatal,  as  having  reference  to  the  selfhood  spiritually 
regarded.  Both  men  have  an  insane  belief  that  one 
man  has  a  capacity  to  be  better  i?i  himself  than  an- 
other; but  this  belief  is  much  more  insane  in  one 
than  the  other,  as  the  moralist  thinks  such  capacity 
due  to  the  man's  nature  merely,  while  the  church- 
man thinks  it  due  in  every  case  to  the  man's  spiritual 
culture  or  regeneration,  that  is  at  bottom,  to  the  man 
himself:  and  this  latter  persuasion  is  far  more  in- 
veterate than  the  former.  Thus  the  men  are  alike 
blind,  only  one  superficially,  the  other  substantially, 
so ;  the  moralist  being  outwardly  blind,  blind  to  the 
light  of  natural  fact,  and  the  churchman  inwardly  or 
spiritually  bhnd,  blind  to  the  light  of  Divine  truth. 
You  see  then  that  the  outlook  of  the  moralist,  who  is 
this  w^orld's  worldling,  is  not  half  so  gloomy  spirit- 
ually as  that  of  the  churchman,  who  is  the  worldling 
of  another  and  a  better  world,  as  it  is  called :  for 
the  former  is  simply  unintelligent  or  errs  by  defect, 
while  the  latter's  lack  of  intelligence  is  handicapped 
by  a  wholly  fatuous  or  misleading  light,  which  is  that 
of  self-righteousness. 


BUT  MORE  CURABLE  IN  THE  FORMER.     415 

There  seems  accordingly  but  little  hope  for  the 
churchman.  The  moralist  may  be  safely  left  for 
correction  to  the  course  of  events,  which  seems  to 
be  fast  ushering  in  a  more  stable  order  than  that 
he  is  wont  to  delight  in.  For  the  moralist's  judg- 
ment follows  the  guidance  of  sense  exclusively,  and 
when  sense  itself  attests  the  spiritual  truth  of  things 
he  will  no  longer  be  victimized  by  error.  But  the 
churchman  has  not  this  agreeable  prospect  before 
him.  His  inioard  light  has  itself  become  darkness, 
and  when  that  is  the  case  the  darkness  is  utter  and 
absolute :  for  it  is  no  longer  the  subject  eye  that  is 
in  fault  (as  with  the  moralist),  but  the  objective  light 
itself,  lohich  alone  empowers  any  eye  to  see,  has  under- 
gone eclipse.  The  churchman  as  such  *  accordingly 
is  without  a  future,  his  lot  being  to  decrease  as  the 
substance  he  has  always  spiritually  symbolized  or 
stood  for  increases :  this  substance  being  the  Lord, 
of  Divine  Natural  man,  that  is,  Society. 

*  For  I  Lope  no  reader  of  these  letters  will  deem  me  so  presump- 
tuous as  to  think  of  pronouncing  judgment  upon  the  future  of  concrete 
flesh-and-blood  men  —  whether  they  be  cliurchmen  or  statesmen  —  for 
I  venture  to  say  that  these  in  common  with  us  niucli  happier  nauieless 
men  wUl  have  a  greatly  better  personal  fortune  at  the  Divine  hands 
than  any  of  them  ecclesiastically  or  politically  deserve,  whether  that 
fortune  consign  them  to  heaven  or  hell.  It  is  only  the  abstract  churcli- 
man  and  statesman  (as  alone  representatively  existing  to  the  Divine 
mind)  whom  my  strictures  have  to  do  with,  and  by  no  means  any  lit- 
eral person  so  named. 


416  IT   IS  MORE  SUPERFICIAL  IN  THE  ONE, 

Doubtless  tlie  reason  why  the  evil  which  the 
churchman  formally  embodies,  or  with  which  he  is 
representatively  identified,  is  so  much  more  hopeless 
than  that  which  the  moralist  propagates  and  perpetu- 
ates, is,  as  I  have  perhaps  already  said,  that  it  is 
spiritual  or  central,  involving  the  heart,  while  the 
other  is  merely  natural  or  circumferential,  involving 
the  senses.  False  witness,  fraud,  adultery,  murder, 
and  covetousness  are  natiu-al  to  man,  that  is,  are 
inevitable  to  his  nature  as  a  creature  of  infinitude 
so  long  as  he  is  intellectually  unaware  of  the  spirit- 
ual or  inward  and  impersonal  quality  of  such  in- 
finitude, and  instinctively  seeks  to  realize  it  in  this 
absurd  personal  way :  as  if  the  bonds  of  his  person- 
ality (which  are  so  useful  and  necessary  in  giving 
him  fixity  or  standing-ground  to  his  own  conscious- 
ness) had  only  to  be  thrown  ofi",  and  not  reverently 
taken  up  into  his  own  spiritual  substance,  in  order 
to  achieve  the  freedom  he  thus  instinctively  or  hu- 
manly craves.  It  always  seems  to  flesh  and  blood 
that  freedom  is  one  with  emancipation  from  law,  and 
it  is  nothing  but  this  false  persuasion  that  makes  all 
our  clandestine  ways  appear  so  sweet  to  the  ordinary 
flesh-and-blood  mind.  The  moment  a  thing  is  for- 
bidden to  that  mind,  however  indifferent  to  it  the 
man  may  have  been  the  moment  before,  he  becomes 
eager  to  do  it.     The  reason  is  that  he  mistakes  the 


AND  MORE  SUBSTANTIAL  IN  THE  OTHEE.         417 

purpose  of  law,  which  is  by  no  means  to  suppress 
our  outward  freedom,  but  by  moderating  its  wan- 
ton and  suicidal  extravagance,  or  guarding  it  from 
license,  to  educate  us  to  inward,  spiritual,  or  Di- 
vine freedom.  The  flesh-and-blood  mind  is  not  the 
true  or  distinctively  human  mind,  but  merely  the 
mind  of  the  animal  in  us.  And  the  animal  mind  is 
bound  of  its  own  nature  to  be  servile  to  the  human 
mind,  and  realize  its  only  chance  of  freedom  by 
acquiescing  in  such  servitude.  Of  course  the  man 
himself  has  got  to  be  de-animalized,  that  is,  to 
become  spiritual  and  human  before  the  animal  in 
him  can  be  placated  or  subdued.  The  State  prison 
convict  no  doubt  finds  it  very  hard  to  imagine  loMle 
he  is  1)1  prison  that  his  nature  entitles  him  to  any 
truer  freedom  than  that  which  the  opening  of  the 
prison  doors  would  give  him.  But  this  is  only  be- 
cause his  misconduct  in  depriving  himself  of  outward 
freedom  has  enhanced  and  inflamed  the  animal  con- 
sciousness in  him,  and  thereby  deadened  him  for  the 
time  to  all  inward  and  higher  manifestations  of 
freedom.  When  one  is  incarcerated  hi/  Ms  oion  mis- 
deeds I  defy  him  to  entertain  anything  but  a  most 
unmanly  conception  of  freedom,  being  sure  to  make 
it  outward  solely,  or  to  lie  in  the  power  of  doing 
evil  with  impunity.  If  his  folly  had  left  him  free 
to  conceive  of  it  in  its  human  aspect,  as  the  power 


418         ALL  MANNER  OF  SIN  FORGIVEN  TO  MEN 

of  doing  good,  and  good  alone,  at  the  instance  of 
one's  heart,  he  would  be  instantly  reconciled  to 
his  fetters,  nay,  would  pray  for  additional  bolts  and 
stronger  bars. 

But  this  natural  ignorance  of  man,  profound  as  it 
unquestionably  is,  is  altogether  excusable  and  tran- 
sient, and  by  no  means  leaves  him  without  hope ; 
for  any  possible  subsequent  Divine  enlargement  of 
his  nature  will  be  sure  to  enlarge  and  improve  his 
moral  temper.  Thus  we  may  say  that  the  slanderer, 
the  swindler,  the  adulterer,  the  murderer,  the  covetous 
man  universally  in  short,  whatever  be  his  spiritual 
ignorance  or  superstition,  never  finds  it  excluding 
him  from  immortal  life,  if  indeed  he  himself  have 
happily  any  aspiration  towards  such  a  thing.  For,  as 
Christ  taught,  ''all  manner  of  sin  and  blasphemi/  shall 
be  forgiven  unto  men,  excejd  the  sin  or  blasphemi/ 
against  the  holy  spirit,  lohich  has  no  forgiveness  either 
in  this  world  or  that  tvhich  is  to  come."  That  is  to 
say :  our  moral  evils  are  natural,  and  spring  from 
the  circumstance  that  our  nature  is  not  yet  Divinely 
redeemed  or  recovered  from  the  influence  of  man's 
finite  personality  and  reduced  to  permanent  order ; 
hence  they  have  only  an  actual  force  and  will  alto- 
gether disappear  when  human  nature  comes  to  spir- 
itual or  social  out  of  material  or  selfish  form.  But 
self-righteousness  is  an  inward  or  spiritual  condition 


BUT  THAT  AGAINST  THE  HOLY  GHOST.      419 

of  the  subject  laying  hold  upon  a  man  not  through 
his  body,  or  what  relates  him  to  the  outward  world, 
but  through  his  soul,  or  what  relates  him  to  God : 
so  vitiating  or  falsifying  him  at  the  very  core  of  his 
being.  Tor  a  man's  being  is  spiritually  determined 
solely  by  the  idea  he  entertains  at  heart  of  God  as 
a  being  of  really  infinite  goodness,  towards  whom 
his  only  logical  or  proper  attitude  therefore  is  one  of 
prostrate  adoration  or  humility.  Now  it  is  evident 
that  no  man  who  is  at  all  satisfied  with  himself  — 
much  less  a  man  whose  self-satisfaction  is  motived 
upon  a  persuasion  of  his  own  exceptional  private 
regeneration  —  is  capable  of  feeling  adoration  towards 
the  infinite  goodness :  or,  to  say  the  same  thing  in 
other  words,  is  capable  of  a  humble  or  deprecatory 
judgment  in  relation  to  himself.  How  shall  a  man 
dare  to  think  meanly  of  himself  when  he  looks  upon 
that  self  as  a  piece  of  exquisite  Divine  or  regener- 
ative workmanship  ?  This  would  be  to  think  meanly 
of  God,  so  that  even  the  churchman's  piety  is  a  snare 
to  him  and  constrains  him  to  self-delusion.  In  fact 
the  devil  arms  his  hooks  nowadays  with  no  subtler 
or  more  specious  bait  than  that  of  piety,  and  people 
who  are  so  unfortunate  as  to  have  it  in  their  blood, 
inheriting  a  more  or  less  devout  temperament  from 
their  ancestors,  cannot  be  too  thankful  to  the  frosty 
providence  that  so  often  kindly  nips  in  the  bud  their 


420      SELF-rJGHTEOUSNESS  THE  OUTGROWTH  OF  A 

nascent  aspirations  after  personal  holiness,  and  so  if 
need  be  compels  them  personally  into  the  safer  spir- 
itual paths  of  a  frank  and  utter  worldliness. 

Certainly  then  self-righteousness  —  which  is  a  sat- 
isfactory estimate  of  one's  own  selfhood,  character, 
or  standing  as  compared  with  that  of  the  vast  ma- 
jority of  men,  those  embraced  in  the  "  world "  for 
example  —  is  spiritually  the  only  fatal  form  of  un- 
godliness. And  just  as  certainly  it  is  a  plant  requir- 
ing for  its  development  a  church-soil ;  so  that  if  the 
church  had  never  existed  as  an  integral  or  repre- 
sentative factor  in  the  development  of  human  nature, 
we  should  have  been  at  a  loss  to  imagine  any  soil 
rank  enough  or  tropical  enough  to  produce  it;  and 
men  accordingly  would  have  been  left  to  the  much 
less  harmful  dominion  and  devices  of  their  merely 
selfish  and  worldly  loves.  This  at  any  rate  is  my 
own  thorough  intellectual  conviction,  and  I  am  bound 
to  show  you  the  grounds  of  it. 

Do  me  the  justice  however  not  to  imagine  that 
I  am  going  to  overwhelm  you  with  any  scientific 
evidence  of  the  truth  of  my  conviction,  such  evidence 
as  will  compel  your  assent,  or  deprive  you  of  freedom 
to  think  differently  from  me.  For  such  evidence  is 
out  of  place  in  reference  to  intellectual  things  or 
truths  of  perception.  My  conviction,  for  example, 
in  relation  to  the  intimate  connection  between  a  self- 


CHURCH-SOIL  IN  OUR  NATURE.  421 

righteous  temper  in  man  and  the  atmosphere  of  the 
church  institution,  is  not  the  fruit  of  any  scientific 
observation  or  inductive  reasoning  on  my  part,  though 
these  things  aptly  enough  come  in  to  enforce  it. 
And  a  parade  therefore  of  the  scientific  grounds  of 
such  a  conviction  would  not  only  be  uncalled  for 
or  inappropriate,  but  would  prove  derogatory  to  the 
interests  of  a  much  larger  and  Diviner  life  in  man 
than  that  of  science,  to  which  I  at  all  events  feel 
my  sympathies  primarily  due :  I  mean  of  course  our 
distinctively  intellectual  life,  or  the  life  which  is 
authenticated  by  our  affections,  and  not  by  our  senses. 
Neither  is  the  conviction  in  question  the  fruit  pri- 
marily of  any  private  spiritual  regeneration  on  my 
part,  but  is  such  fruit  only  in  a  rigidly  secondary 
sense,  that  is,  only  in  so  far  as  my  private  spiritual 
regeneration  is  itself  the  fruit  altogether  of  a  Divine 
redemption  of  our  common  nature.  In  short,  you 
must  all  along  assiduously  remember  that  we  are  not 
now  talking  of  any  paltry  fact  of  organic  experience, 
or  fact  of  sense,  which  can  be  scientifically  probed 
or  proved :  proved,  that  is,  to  men's  senses :  but  of 
a  truth  of  men's  inward  or  regenerate  nature  exclu- 
sively, of  their  living  or  spiritual  experience,  of  their 
soul-history  as  it  were;  a  truth  which  has  slowly 
flowered  out  of  the  suffering  human  heart,  and  which 
therefore  appeals  for  its  ratification  in   every  mind 


422      BOTH   "THE  CHURCH"  AND   "THE  WORLD" 

solely  to  the  man's  cultivated  or  disciplined  affections. 
It  is  a  truth  which  no  amount  of  merely  scientific 
culture,  nor  any  ardor  of  ratiocinative  acumen,  will 
ever  qualify  a  man  to  do  justice  to.  In  fact  these 
things  are  very  apt  to  disqualify  men  for  the  ac- 
knowledgment of  spiritual  or  living  truth,  since  the 
method  of  science  and  that  of  intellectual  cognition 
are  directly  opposed :  the  one  proceeding  from  with- 
out inwards,  or  from  sense  to  soul;  the  other  from 
within  outwards,  or  from  soul  to  sense.* 

But  let  me  at  least  present  some  orderly  consid- 
erations to  you  which  may  throw  light  upon  the 
grounds  of  my  conviction  that  all  our  spiritual  evil 
—  evil  of  self-righteousness  —  is  intimately  connected 
with  the  outgrowth  and  development  of  the  church 
in  human  nature. 

Por  the  "church"  is  just  as  much  a  natural  fact, 
or  outgrowth  of  human  nature  as  the  "world"  is. 
In  casting  our  eyes  back  to  the  beginnings  of  man's 
earthly  genesis  we  find  his  consciousness  almost  com- 

*  A  man  shaving  himself  before  a  looking-glass  always  appears,  to 
one  whose  eye  is  fixed  upon  the  glass,  to  be  shaving  himself  with  his 
left  baud.  This  illustrates  the  immature  judgment  of  science  in  making 
sense  the  supreme  arbiter  of  truth  as  well  as  of  fact.  Of  course  the 
man's  living  or  intellectual  judgment  of  the  truth  of  the  case  is  sure 
to  correct  this  scientific  judgment,  inasmuch  as,  to  the  intellect  or  life, 
the  sensible  form  or  appearance  of  things  is  never  in  direct  but  always 
in  inverse  accord  with  their  spiritual  substance  or  being. 


A  MERE  GERMINATION   OF  HUMAN  NATURE.        423 

pletely  submerged  by  his  senses.  The  needs  of  their 
visible  subsistence  are  at  first  imperative  upon  men, 
and  they  know  httle  more  than  the  instincts  and  the 
arts  that  relate  them  to  the  satisfaction  of  their  bod- 
ily appetites.  Some  men  are  endowed  with  quicker 
senses,  with  greater  physical  force  and  endurance, 
with  subtler  inventive  ingenuity  and  alertness,  than 
others,  and  these  qualities  insure  their  subjects  an 
exceptionally  successful  career.  Men  of  a  slower 
nature  on  the  other  hand,  men  of  a  defective  wit 
and  sagacity,  men  of  a  sluggish  individual  genius 
with  perhaps  a  greater  tendency  to  sociability  or 
companionship  than  others,  constitute  a  comparatively 
unfortunate  or  inferior  and  dependent  class.  The 
foraier  no  doubt  in  every  community  are  a  small 
minority  of  men,  and  "keep  the  world  going,"  as 
we  say,  for  their  superior  practical  or  productive  en- 
ergy soon  throws  the  government  of  the  community 
into  their  hands.  The  latter  are  a  very  large  ma- 
jority of  the  human  family,  and  are  doomed  to  gravi- 
tate erelong  into  the  condition  of  mere  proletaries, 
keeping  up  the  fecundity  of  the  race.  All  which  is 
only  saying,  in  other  words,  that  the  former  constitute 
a  select  or  distinguished  class  of  men,  while  their 
brethren  as  a  class  are  totally  without  distinction. 

Now  to  the  devout  imagination :   for  it  is  almost 
needless  to  say,  that  in  face  of  this  great  and  formi- 


424     "CHURCH"   AND   "WORLD"   A  DISTINCTIVELY 

dable  reality  of  a  fixed  outward  world,  and  before 
the  world  has  betrayed  its  latent  humanity,  or  sub- 
serviency to  Divine  uses,  all  men  are  helplessly,  or 
as  we  say  instinctively,  devout,  even  to  the  pitch  of 
superstition  or  fetichism  :  to  the  devout  imagination 
of  men,  I  repeat,  there  is  in  this  obvious  charac- 
teristic division  of  men  into  two  classes  a  natural 
basis  for  the  church,  or  for  the  acknowledgment  of 
a  Divinely  providential  order  in  the  earth.  There  is 
as  yet  of  course  no  such  thing  as  the  church  in  name, 
or  as  a  corporate  organization  fenced  in  from  the 
outlying  world  of  mankind  by  ritual  ceremonies  or 
observances ;  but  it  is  there  practically  or  in  substance 
all  the  while,  inwardly  recognizable  to  every  one  in 
whom  a  strong  virus  of  personality,  or  selfhood,  or 
character  has  had  opportunity  to  assert  itself,  and 
it  only  awaits  the  imposition  of  its  name  to  be  sub- 
missively recognized  or  acquiesced  in  by  the  vulgar 
intelligence  as  well.  For  the  fundamental  idea  of 
the  church  as  a  corporate  or  visible  institution  is 
that  of  a  select  or  chosen  few  of  mankind  Divinely 
culled,  or  called  out,  from  the  undistinguished,  cha- 
otic or  monotonous  mass  of  men,  and  set  apart  to 
the  Divine  service  and  honor.  And  where  to  the 
eye  of  our  innocent  or  unsophisticated  carnal  intel- 
ligence is  this  idea  better  embodied  than  it  is  in 
those   who   either   by   their   productive   genius    and 


NATURAL  DEVELOPMENT  IN  MAN.  425 

energy  first  make  the  earth  fruitful,  and  introduce 
the  community  to  the  acquaintance  of  wealth  and  its 
resources,  or  else  by  their  manifest  military  skill  and 
prowess  teach  the  community  how  to  defend  and  pro- 
tect their  life  and  property  from  the  cupidity  of  in- 
vaders ?  These  men  by  their  inventive  sagacity  and 
enterprise,  by  their  heroism,  by  their  administrative 
skill  and  ability,  are  for  the  time  a  true  Divine  seed 
in  human  nature,  and  mark  or  constitute  the  dis- 
tinctively providential  movement  in  humanity.  They 
are  the  astute  Abrams,  and  Isaacs,  and  Jacobs  who 
all  unknown  to  themselves  marshal  the  otherwise 
imbecile  masses  of  men  into  line  with  man's  Di- 
vine-natural destiny.  And  they  constitute  accordingly 
God's  true  church  in  the  earth  so  long  as  the  church 
is  at  all  a  puissant  reality  :  that  is  to  say,  long  before 
it  has  attained  to  the  outward  name  or  conscious- 
ness of  being  a  church,  and  sunk  into  the  unwhole- 
some and  emasculate  spiritual  dilettantism  which 
that  unfortunate  name  or  consciousness  connotes. 

Here  then  is  my  first  point  made :  the  church 
and  —  by  virtue  of  its  inclusion  in  that  —  the  world 
are  both  alike  rigidly  natural  facts,  are  both  alike 
indubitable  historic  j^owers  or  /mictions  of  human  na- 
ture, and  represent  nothing  more  than  the  alter- 
nate spiritual  and  material  aspect  wdiich  human 
history  derives  from  its   undoubted    natural  factors. 


426       "CHURCH"   AND    "WORLD"   NATURAL  FACTS. 


And  the  second  point  which  I  intended  to  establish 
was  that  our  existing  self-righteous  tendencies,  which 
spiritually  viewed  are  the  only  reprehensible  tenden- 
cies of  human  nature,  come  from  the  church,  and 
are  a  wholly  proper  development  or  expression  of 
her  spirit  in  us.  That  is  to  say,  my  general  purpose 
in  establishing  this  point  is  to  show  that  the  sacred 
element  in  human  life,  in  so  far  as  it  has  come  to  the 
surface  of  consciousness  in  institutions,  or  can  he  in 
any  way  literally  identified,  is  infinitely  less  innocent 
than  the  rival  secular  element,  and  does  infinitely 
more  harm  to  the  spiritual  life  of  man. 

But  this  proposition,  because  it   involves  a 

much  more  spiritual  apprehension  of  the  meaning 
of  human  nature,  and  a  much  closer  insight  into 
its  metaphysical  principles,  had  better  be  left  for  its 
working  out  to  another  letter. 


-^rr-tv      It      in      »»      »i      VI      It      i'j      III      iii     »i     m>     i-t 


LETTER    XXVII. 


'Y  DEAR  FRIEND  :  We  saw  in  the  last 
letter  that  the  church  and  the  world  are 
both  alike  facts  of  human  nature,  and  ex- 
press nothing  but  her  composite  parentage, 
her  mixed  Divine  and  human  genius.  Human  nature 
has  an  equal  aspect  towards  God  and  man,  for  it  is 
confessedly  the  nature  of  a  creature,  and  a  creature 
is  nothing  in  itself  but  the  existence  or  going  forth  of 
its  creator.  Thus  we  may  say  it  has  both  a  Divine 
side  by  virtue  of  God  alone  being  a  creator,  and  a 
human  side  by  virtue  of  this  creator  being  essential 
man.  For  we  must  always  bear  in  mind  that  the 
human  side  of  our  nature  is  not  in  the  least  consti- 
tuted by  us  phenomenal  men  (by  you  and  me,  for 
instance,  and  others  like  you  and  me,  who  call  our- 
selves men)  but  solely  by  God  the  Lord  who  alone  is 
Man  both  spiritually  and  naturally.  You  and  I,  you 
know,  are  merely  conscious  men ;  that  is,  we  seem  to 
ourselves  to  be  a  human  realitv,  but  in  tfuth  we  are 


428        WE  DO  NOT  INHERIT  HUMAN  NATURE,   BUT 

mere  shadows  of  such  reahty,  having  no  more  of 
human  substance  in  ourselves,  no  more  pretension 
either  of  us  actually  to  be  the  man  Ave  seem,  than 
our  shadow  in  a  looking-glass  has  to  be  our  personal 
substance.  We  are  just  the  same  seeming  or  sem- 
blance in  the  natural  sphere,  or  sphere  of  conscious- 
ness, which  that  phenomenon  is  in  the  scientific 
sphere,  or  sphere  of  sense,  with  precisely  the  same 
claim  to  objective  reality  or  spiritual  being,  as  it  has 
to  subjective  reality  or  moral  consciousness,  not  a 
particle  more  or  less.  Besides  you  know  that  nature 
is  one  and  universal,  while  we  are  nothing  if  we  are 
not  many  and  particular.  You  know  moreover,  at 
least  I  have  no  doubt  you  do,  I  do  at  all  events,  that 
though  we  all  the  while  flatter  ourselves  that  we  pos- 
sess this  universal  substance,  and  are  wont  to  claim 
human  nature  as  our  own,  what  a  struggle  it  always 
costs  us  to  arrive  at  the  least  inward  realization  of 
it,  or  universalize  ourselves  in  our  affections  one  jot. 
And  then,  after  all  our  struggles,  we  are  compelled  to 
lay  aside  our  familiar  flesh  and  bones  in  the  grave, 
as  if  w^e  had  been  confessedly  animals  all  along  and 
not  men.  Thus  I  admit  that  you  and  I  and  all  other 
men  are  phenomenal  or  conscious  forms  of  humanity, 
and  give  forth  or  reproduce  in  our  petty  persons 
some  faint  shadow  of  her  stupendous  substance.  But 
this  is  a  totally  distinct  thing  from  saying  that  we 


-     ATTAIN  TO  IT   BY  REGENERATION.  429 

ourselves  constitute  humanity,  unless  indeed  we  are 
willing  to  reckon  the  shadow  of  a  thing  identical  with 
its  substance.  For  if  we  are  veritable  phenomena, 
manifestations,  products  of  human  nature,  unques- 
tionable deliverances  of  her  miraculous  womb,  it  is 
simply  preposterous  to  suppose  that  she  can  feel  her 
existence  contingent  for  a  moment  upon  ours,  how- 
ever much  indeed  the  consciousness  of  such  existence 
may  be  confined  to  us. 

Remember  then,  my  friend,  that  you  and  I  and  all 
the  other  minim  personalities  of  the  universe  are  so 
far  from  constituting  the  human  side  of  our  nature 
that  we  are  full  surely  constituted  by  it,  deriving  all 
our  power  consciously  to  exist  and  act  from  it,  and  it 
alone.  Nor  can  any  of  us  atomic  men,  however  much 
we  may  claim  to  be  children  of  nature,  ever  boast 
himself  of  being  in  any  sense  her  favorite  child.  She 
makes  small  account  of  persons  at  any  time,  allowing 
us  to  be  cut  down  in  myriads  whenever  she  feels  her- 
self impelled  to  a  fuller  manifestation  of  herself,  and 
she  drenches  us  with  a  perpetual  shower  of  personal 
disasters,  which  rob  us  of  assured  health  or  fortune 
or  of  stable  domestic  felicity  in  a  way  to  prove  even 
to  the  dullest  imagination,  that  she  is  at  deadly  and 
deliberate  war  with  our  private  Avelfare  save  in  so  far 
as  it  is  a  mere  reflection  of  our  public  worth.  The 
undeniable  reason  of  this  inveterate  hostility  on  the 


430  OUR  NATURAL  HISTORY  IS 

part  of  nature  to  men's  private  consequence  when 
unconditioned  upon  their  pubhc  desert,  is  that  being 
human  cm  fond  her  form  is  necessarily  social,  being 
the  intense  marriage  unity  of  its  particular  and  uni- 
versal interests,  or  its  private  and  public  elements : 
and  so  long  therefore  as  this  natural  marriage  unity 
lacks  its  literal  or  ritual  consecration  in  our  outward 
or  phenomenal  personalities,  this  social  form  of  hu- 
manity will  never  come  to  men's  knowledge,  and  every 
man  accordingly  must  be  left  to  perish  in  his  selfish- 
ness. 

Our  natural  history  in  fact  is  providentially  de- 
signed for  no  other  purpose  than  to  exemplify  the 
vanity  or  nothingness  of  human  individuality  when 
underived  from  race  or  nature,  and  the  gospel  it  pro- 
claims to  every  man  as  the  only  gospel  of  immor- 
tality, as  at  least  the  only  one  he  can  inwardly  live 
by,  is  that  of  a  thoroughly  righteous  self-contempt,  or 
a  just  disdain  of  his  own  interests  whenever  they 
bring  him  into  collision  with  those  of  society  or  his 
fellow-man.  For  the  only  real  fellow  that  the  indi- 
vidual man  has  in  nature,  is  by  no  means  some  other 
individual  man  (for  this  would  be  not  fellowship  or 
equality  but  identity)  but  the  complex  or  composite 
man,  society.  Society  is  the  only  real  or  Divine  nat- 
ural man,  and  we  individual  men  (falsely  so-called) 
attain  to  a  real  or  Divinely  recognizable  individuality 


A  DIVINELY  REDEMPTIVE  PROCESS.  431 

only  in  identifying  ourselves  with  him :  that  is,  in 
losing  our  life  in  ourselves  and  finding  it  again,  resur- 
gent, in  society.  The  intellectual  meaning  with  which 
this  great  fact  of  experience  is  fraught  is,  that  what  we 
call  nature,  meaning  thereby  the  outward  world,  the 
world  apprehended  by  sense,  and  in  spite  of  its  over- 
whelming reality  to  sense,  is  at  bottom  a  profound 
Divine  imposture  or  cheat  which  is  most  providen- 
tially engineered  all  the  while  in  the  interest  of  in- 
effable (that  is  to  say,  infinite  and  eternal)  spiritual 
realities  of  which  it  is  the  exact  counterpart  and  cor- 
respondence, and  which  therefore  we  should  always 
remain  ignorant  of  unless  we  were  thus  figuratively  or 
experimentally  taught.  These  ineffable  and  (unless 
they  be  revealed)  unthinkable  spiritual  realities  are 
God :  as  He  is  called  by  those  who  recognize  Him 
mainly  as  he  is  outwardly  revealed  to  the  understand- 
ing under  the  form  of  Truth :  and  Man :  as  he  is 
named  by  those  who  recognize  Him  mainly  as  he  is 
inwardly  revealed  to  the  heart  under  the  form  of 
Good :  but  God-man,  or  the  Lord,  as  He  is  more 
comprehensively  designated  by  those  who  recognize 
him  as  a  practical  providence  in  history,  that  is,  as  He 
becomes  revealed  to  sense  under  the  form  of  power, 
or  goodness  and  truth  united,  in  order  to  effect  the 
actual  redemption  of  human  nature  or  the  human  race 
from  death. 


432  HUMAN   NATURE  IS  A  UNIVERSAL 

What  tlien  finally  is  nature  in  herself  regarded  ?  I 
don't  mean  what  is  commonly  called  nature,  being 
the  external  world,  which  is  a  mere  chaos  of  mineral, 
vegetable,  and  animal  existence  without  rhythm  or 
law  in  itself  to  make  it  intelligible,  for  this  in  truth 
is  not  nature  but  merely  that  necessary  background 
or  basis  of  specific  existence  which  nature  requires  to 
emphasize  or  set  off"  her  own  universality.  No,  I  mean 
by  nature  human  nature,  the  nature  of  man,  for  this 
is  the  only  nature  that  objectively  exists  to  its  own 
subjects,  and  so  is  capable  of  giving  them  elevation 
out  of  themselves.  And  if  we  ask  what  human  na- 
ture, or  the  nature  of  man,  is,  we  have  a  sure  index  to 
the  answer  in  ascertaining  what  man  himself  is  :  for 
the  nature  of  a  thing  is  merely  the  development  of 
its  being  to  its  own  consciousness. 

Now  man  is  a  purely  personal,  unreal,  or  phenome- 
nal subject,  existing  only  to  consciousness,  not  to  sense, 
but  firmly  related  to  lower  or  outward  things  by  his 
bodily  organization  or  senses  which  give  him  fixity  or 
finiteness,  and  to  higher  or  inward  things  by  his  in- 
organic, percipient  soul  which  gives  him  freedom  or 
rational  enlargement.  And  human  nature,  then,  be- 
ing the  nature  of  man,  must  be  the  sphere  of  con- 
sciousness in  him,  the  sphere  of  his  conscious  life,  out- 
side of  which  he  does  not  exist.  How  then  does  it 
differ  from  the  man  himself?     If  human  nature  be 


REALM  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS  IN   MAN.  433 

the  sphere  of  consciousness  in  men,  and  man  have  no 
existence  out  of  consciousness,  what  hinders  me  iden- 
tifying myself  with  my  nature  ?  This  fact  alone :  that 
I  being  a  person  am  a  finite  or  particular  form  of  con- 
sciousness, without  universal  quality,  whereas  nature 
not  being  a  person  is  not  a  finite  or  particular  form  of 
consciousness,  but  a  most  indefinite  or  universal  one, 
without  particular  quality.  Accordingly  nature  is  to 
be  logically  defined  as  the  realm  of  consciousness  in 
man,  the  peculiarly  human  realm,  inasmuch  as  it  sepa- 
rates him  from  the  realm  of  sense  which  he  shares  in 
common  with  animal  and  vegetable  and  mineral.  It 
is  no  thin(/,  nor  yet  any  congeries  of  things  save  to 
sense  and  the  judgment  begotten  of  it,  but  a  cer- 
tain undefined  or  purely  potential  and  promissory 
existence  which  subjectively  never  is  but  is  always 
becoming  or  to  he,  and  on  its  sensibly  objective  side 
images  or  reflects  the  intercourse  of  infinite  and  finite, 
God  and  man,  spirit  and  flesh,  constituting  indeed  to 
our  sensuous  imagination  the  eternal  link  or  liaison 
of  the  two.  For  as  God  being  creative  is  infinite  in 
himself,  that  is,  spirit  or  life,  and  therefore  essentially 
inward,  and  as  man  being  created  is  finite  in  himself , 
that  is,  matter  or  death,  and  therefore  essentially  out- 
ward, there  must  be  spiritually  an  endless  and  fatal 
subjective  disagreement  between  the  two  creative  fac- 
tors: so  that  if  some  middle  term  did  not  exist  to 


434  HUMAN  NATURE  NOT  THE  SPIRITUAL 


fuse  or  reconcile  these  discordant  factors  in  her  o^Yn 
commanding  objectivity,  creation  would  be  a  failure 
in  first  principles.  Now  nature  is  this  actual  middle 
term.  She  offers  her  effectual  mediation  to  the  rival 
or  opposite  creative  factors,  and  by  her  strictly  un- 
defined or  universal  objectivity  covers  up  or  makes 
amends  for  their  subjective  disagreement  by  allowing 
them  to  become  objectively  one  or  united,  witJiin  her 
own  strict  limits  mind  you,  or  mutually  to  change 
places,  infinite  becoming  finite  and  finite  infinite,  in  a 
new  and  immortal  human  individuality. 

Nature  accordingly  is  not  creation,  nor  any  part 
of  creation  (though  she  is  included  in  it  as  the  crea- 
ture's constitutional  or  mother-substance),  for  creation 
is  wholly  spiritual,  living,  or  subjective,  being  the 
work  of  omnipotence,  or  of  God's  infinity  and  eternity, 
and  is  therefore  inscrutable  to  mortal  ken.  But  though 
nature  is  not  either  in  whole  or  in  part  God's  spirit- 
ual creation,  she  nevertheless  most  truly  reveals  or 
accommodates  it  to  our  nascent  and  obstinate  in- 
telligence, and  is  herself  frankly  unintelligible  and 
misleading  save  as  such  revelation.  We  should  never 
have  been  able  even  to  dream  of  creation  as  a  living 
and  spiritual  or  miraculous  work  of  God,  nor  of  God 
himself  consequently  as  a  being  infinite  and  eternal 
in  love,  wisdom,  and  power,  if  nature  were  a  fixed 
physical  existence  or  quantity  shut  up  to  the  dimen- 


CREATION,   BUT  REVEALS  IT.  435 

sions  of  space  and  time.  But  this  is  just  what  she  is 
not  —  a  fixed  physical  existence,  but  a  wholly  unfixed 
or  metaphysical  one,  forever  enlarging  to  men's  affec- 
tion and  thought  as  their  affection  and  thought  them- 
selves become  penetrated  and  interfused  by  the  Divine 
infinitude,  or  moulded  to  the  inspiration  of  the  creative 
goodness  and  truth.  It  is  true  that  being  the  abjectly 
helpless  and  dependent  intelhgences  we  are,  we  are 
indebted  for  our  earliest  recognition  of  nature's  pres- 
ence and  power  to  the  gross  sensible  forms  of  min- 
eral, vegetable,  and  animal  existence,  and  for  a  long 
time  indeed  do  not  scruple  to  identify  her  personality 
with  such  forms.  But  it  is  not  long  before  we  begin 
to  divine  her  intensely  human  quality,  and  thenceforth 
we  come  to  acknowledge  her  only  as  the  perfect  mar- 
riage fusion  or  unity  of  the  Divine  and  human  natures. 
Remember  then  that  nature  in  herself  or  subjectively 
is  neither  God  nor  man,  but  the  rigid  neutrality  or 
indifference  of  the  two,  while  on  her  objective  side,  or 
viewed  from  the  maternal  uses  she  contributes  to  the 
spiritual  creation,  she  reflects  each  to  the  knowledge 
of  the  other,  and  so  enables  them  each  to  reap  the 
transcendent  spiritual  or  subjective  fruits  of  such 
knowledge.  Or,  to  say  the  same  thing  in  other 
words,  remember  that  nature  is  neither  a  spiritual  nor 
yet  a  physical  existence,  but  a  most  strictly  metaphys- 
ical or  empirical  one,  provisionally  mediating  between 


436  SHE  FILLS  OUT  OUR  UNREAL  PERSONS 

the  two,  since  while  it  owes  its  base  or  fixed  body  to 
physics,  it  owes  its  superstructure  or  free  expansive 
soul  entirely  to  spirit. 

But  although  nature  is  a  purely  metaphysic  realm, 
it  will  not  do  to  infer  that  she  is  therefore  without 
cognizable  form.  Existence  is  not  possible  without 
cognizable  form,  nor  even  conceivable  without  think- 
able form,  because  distinctive  form  is  the  essence  of  a 
thing  or  what  it  derives  from  the  creative  Esse.  It  is 
true  that  nature  being  metaphysic  substance  is  with- 
out material  form  in  se,  form  discernible  to  sense  ; 
but  the  entire  realm  of  personality  is  hers,  and  the 
material  world  exists  only  to  furnish  a  basis  to  person- 
ality. Thus  though  nature  herself  is  not  material 
she  yet  holds  the  whole  realm  of  physics  subject  to 
her  metaphysic  will.  Sense  in  fact  is  simply  con- 
sciousness in  solution.  And  the  reason  doubtless 
therefore  why  personality  is  never  discernible  to  sense 
but  only  to  consciousness,  is  because  sense  is  included 
in  consciousness  as  the  marble  in  the  statue,  or  what- 
ever mere  materies  in  whatever  ojms.  And  surely 
you  would  not  expect  the  dead  matter  of  a  thing  to 
be  able  to  judge  of  the  living  form  to  which  it  is 
subservient. 

It  is  very  much  the  fashion  just  now  with  scientific 
fledglings  and  unintellectual  people  generally  to  decry 
metaphysics,  or  sneer  at  them  in  fact,  as  though  meta- 


WITH   VALID   HUMAN   SUBSTANCE.  437 

physical  existence  were  confessedly  no  existence,  or  as 
if  all  existence  were  bound  to  be  real  or  impersonal, 
and  confess  itself  in  the  last  analysis  a  thing.  I  don't 
mean  to  profess  any  contempt  for  things,  for  at  times 
I  feel  a  very  considerable  relish  for  them,  and  derive 
much  comfort  from  them.  But  at  the  same  time  I 
should  be  wretched  to  think  all  existence  confined 
to  them.  My  affections  are  very  apt  to  go  out  to- 
wards persons,  and  if  I  could  be  persuaded  therefore 
that  persons  had  no  souls,  but  only  bodies,  my  proper 
human  life  would  be  very  much  diminished.  Instead 
of  being  as  I  had  thought  it  a  house  of  three  stories 
at  the  very  least,  I  should  find  it  reduced  to  a  house  of 
one  story,  and  that  a  squalid  basement  sunk  in  earth. 
These  persons  to  be  sure  are  but  finite  forms,  im- 
perfect images,  of  goodness  and  truth.  But  in  conse- 
quence of  that  very  fact  they  exert  a  most  benignant 
power  or  influence  upon  my  life  :  for  I  cannot  know 
goodness  and  truth  in  themselves,  but  only  as  they 
approximate  themselves  to  my  feeble  understanding 
in  finite  types.  I  am  much  impressed  also  with  the 
beauty  of  certain  persons,  with  their  artistic  genius  or 
their  executive  talent  and  skill,  and  if  the  persons 
did  not  exist  who  betrayed  these  attractive  qualities 
to  me,  I  should  feel  myself  sadly  mystified  or  trifled 
with.  But  if  these  persons  exist  at  all,  they  exist 
one  and  all  only  metaphysically.    That  is  to  say,  their 


438  SHE   IS   THE  LIFE   OF   LAW   OR   ORDER 

existence  —  while  it  acknowledges  a  physical  basis, 
imperatively  claims  at  the  same  time  a  free  or  sjjiritual 
superstructure.  And  it  is  only  a  priggish  or  pedantic 
person  who  is  liable  to  the  gross  mistake  alike  in 
science  as  in  art  of  making  base  dominate  superstruc- 
ture, or  body  govern  soul. 

Now  by  what  signs  is  metaphysical  existence  char- 
acterized that  it  shall  not  be  swamped  in  physics? 
In  other  words,  how  do  we  recognize  the  natural 
force  in  things,  and  recognize  it  so  infallibly  as  to 
be  in  no  danger  of  ever  confounding  it  in  thought 
with  their  material  force  ?  I  think  this  question 
admits  of  a  satisfactory  answer. 

The  natural  force  in  things  then  signalizes  itself 
by  this  infallible  earmark,  namely  :  it  is  a  force  of 
law  or  order,  constraining  our  allegiance  under  pain 
of  death.  This  is  the  invariable  distinction  of  natu- 
ral law :  its  strictly  negative  or  death-hearing  quality 
towards  its  finite  subject.  It  has  on  its  face  no  posi- 
tive or  life-bearing  quality  whatever  for  its  subject, 
absolutely  none,  but  remorselessly  shuts  him  up  to 
despair  and  death  in  himself,  as  if  to  warn  him  past 
all  possibility  of  mistake  that  nature  disowns  a  finite 
subjectivity,  and  will  never  therefore  under  any  cir- 
cumstances justify  his  private  pretension  to  be  her 
proper  offspring.  It  chases  the  subject  out  of  every 
hidden  nook   and   corner  of  his  personal  conscious- 


IN  ALL  LOWER  EXISTENCES.  439 

ness,  and  makes  even  his  most  innocent  and  transient 
animal  delights  perilous  to  his  freedom,  or  danger- 
ous to  his  soul's  peace.  Thus  when  I  eat  and  drink 
and  sleep,  or  enact  any  other  automatic  function  pre- 
scribed by  my  animal  organization,  I  am  constrained 
to  be  very  prudent  lest  I  suddenly  find  myself  in 
undesigned  conflict  with  my  nature ;  and  this  is  the 
only  way  that  I  gradually  come  to  natui'al  conscious- 
ness, or  learn  to  separate  myself  from  the  animal 
chained  up  in  my  body.  For  I  never  eat  and  drink 
and  sleep,  you  will  observe,  at  the  instance  of  my 
proper  nature,  which  is  exclusively  human,  and  there- 
fore Divine  and  infinite,  or  free  from  all  want,  but 
at  the  prompting  of  those  gross  animal,  vegetable, 
and  mineral  wants  or  appetites  which  are  necessarily 
bound  up  or  involved  in  my  nature  by  way  of  afford- 
ing it  a  ground  of  evolution  to  the  consciousness  of 
its  subject.  For  human  nature  has  no  outward  or 
objective  evolution,  that  is,  no  evolution  in  itself, 
but  only  to  its  conscious  subject,  and  as  the  true  or 
metaphysic  form  of  such  subjectivity.  Thus  it  has  no 
existence  to  sense,  but  only  to  consciousness.  And 
no  man  who  does  n't  come  to  his  consciousness  of  it 
in  the  purely  inward  or  metaphysic  way  I  have  de- 
scribed, that  is,  only  in  a  loaij  of  hearty  resistance  to 
his  tyrannous  animal  aj^petites  and  tendencies,  has  any 
consciousness  of  it  at  all,  but  remains  at  his  very 


440         SHE  IS  INWARDLY  INSTINCT  WITH  LOVE 

best  a  mere  conscious  animal  in  human  form.  Ac- 
cordingly let  me  eat  or  drink  to  excess,  and  sleep 
without  regard  to  time  and  place,  or  perform  any 
other  of  my  automatic  or  animal  functions  with  a  full 
animal  absorption  in  it,  that  is,  without  a  primary 
respect  to  the  superior  human  convenances  which 
qualify  such  functions  to  men,  and  I  am  instantly 
sure  to  hear  an  inward  Divine  voice  arraigning  me 
as  a  culprit  to  my  own  nature,  and  compelling  me 
perhaps  to  walk  humbly  many  days  afterwards.* 

*  Sic  itur  ad  astra  :  there  is  no  way  of  getting  to  heaven  but  the  way 
of  self-deni'dl,  which  is  inward  or  spiritual  humility.  There  are  but  few 
who  are  content  to  walk  in  this  heavenly  way,  I  know,  because  it  is  uot 
half  so  sweet  and  alluring  to  carnal  thought  as  the  way  of  self-indulgence, 
which  is  that  of  saintly  asceticism.  There  is  nothing  so  inwardly  nour- 
ishing to  SELF-hood  in  man  as  the  culture  of  asceticism,  or  the  practice 
of  needlessly  snubbing  one's  innocent  and  unconscious  flesh :  for  of 
course  the  more  that  is  done  of  this  unrequired  or  gratuitous  work,  the 
more  the  subject's  complacency  in  himself  abounds,  and  the  greater 
grows  his  sense  of  merit,  which  is  the  source  of  all  our  spiritual  defile- 
ment. Our  nature  never  prompts  any  mortification  to  the  flesh  in  us  : 
for  the  flesh  is  always  Divinely  sweet  and  modest  until  it  has  been  be- 
devilled by  our  ascetic  efforts  to  worry  some  comfort  out  of  it  to  our 
5^^-righteous  pretensions  :  but  only  to  the  Jieshhj  mmd,  which  is  the  exact 
mind  of  the  ascetic  or  church-saint.  If  accordingly  you  want  to  see  how 
exquisitely  filthy  a  man  may  inwardly  be  who  is  outwardly  expert  and 
cultivated  in  the  spirit  and  methods  of  ascetic  piety,  you  have  only  to 
look  up  some  of  Swedenborg's  Memorable  Relations,  describing  certain 
of  the  Romish  saints  as  they  appear  in  their  spiritual  undress,  when 
stripped  of  their  decent  and  honorable  natural  clothing,  and  if  I  mistake 
not  you  will  find  yourself  agreeably  edified.     To  judge  from  Sweden- 


AXD  THEREFORE  LOATHES  ASCETICISM.  441 

Such  is  human  nature,  and  its  adverse  bearing 
upon  men's  animal  or  finite  and  outward  person- 
ahties.  But  this  inauspicious  bearing  of  it  seems 
very  much  heightened  when  it  assumes  moral  form, 
and  is  seen  no  longer  simply  controlling  the  relations 
that  bind  a  man  to  his  own  body,  or  to  the  animal 
force  in  his  own  body,  but  much  more  the  inward  or 
metaphysic  relations  of  man  to  man.  For  now  its 
death-bearing  animus  becomes  vividly  enhanced  in 
its  stamping  men  no  longer  vicious  merely,  with  the 
hospital  and  lunatic  asylum  in  prospect,  but  criminal 
as  well,  with  the  jail  and  the  scaffold  in  the  distance 
to  emphasize  or  give  force  to  the  verdict.  It  now 
practically  says  in  fact  that  men  are  not  only  corrupt 

borg's  remarkable  daguerreotypes  (for  they  have  all  the  softness  of  the 
daguerreotype,  betraying  the  ■n'armth  of  love  iu  their  production,  no  less 
than  the  light  of  intelligence)  I  should  say  tliat  this  class  of  persons, 
the  church-saint,  of  all  our  spiritual  mauvais  sujets,  displays  the  most 
inveterately  subterranean  proclivities  or  shows  men's  evil  possibilities  at 
their  ne  plus  ultra  of  development,  their  utmost  refinement  of  natural 
degeneracy.  I  say  this  of  course  not  because  the  saints  in  question 
happen  to  be  E-omish  (though  the  Romish  church  unquestionably  deals 
with  a  lower  order  of  heart  and  mind  than  the  Protestant  does,  and  is 
very  apt  to  breed  therefore  much  more  coarse  and  brutal  conceptions  of 
sanctity  when  it  breeds  any),  but  simply  because  the  aspiration  after 
personal  holiness,  whether  in  Protestant  or  Catholic,  is  the  most  de- 
praved spiritual  tendency  of  the  human  heart,  and  is  utterhj  fatal  there- 
fore to  God's  love  in  the  human  soul.  For  the  infallible  law  of  spirit- 
ual life  is  that  he  who  exalts  himself  shall  be  abased,  and  he  who  abases 
himself  (not  hisfesh,  mind  you  !)  shall  be  exalted. 


442    BUT  ONLY  AS  A  MORAL  FORCE  SHE  SHOWS 

or  worthless  on  their  passive  physical  side,  which  is 
the  mother's  side  in  them,  but  also  and  much  more 
on  their  active,  voluntary,  or  moral  side,  which  they 
inherit  from  the  father.  Thus  my  nature  finally 
reveals  itself  in  its  moral  form  of  evolution  not  merely 
as  the  organ  of  my  instincts,  but  as  the  true  and 
sole  organic  power  behind  my  will  or  personality  :  so 
assailing  my  moral  or  self-righteous  power,  my  pride 
of  freedom  or  selfhood,  in  the  most  secret  fastnesses 
of  its  strength,  and  asserting  its  death -bearing  energy 
over  my  human  person  with  new  emphasis  in  making 
my  fellow-man  henceforth  the  register  and  vindicator 
of  its  decrees,  in  addition  to  or  in  place  of  my  own 
less  faithful  private  conscience. 

I  have  now  at  length,  I  hope,  succeeded  in  making 
two  points  of  first-rate  philosophic  moment  perfectly 
clear  to  you.  1.  We  have  seen  what  human  nature 
is  in  itself,  namely :  a  middle-ground,  or  transition- 
point,  between  creator  and  creature,  God  and  man, 
infinite  and  finite,  spirit  and  flesh,  making  the  two 
freely  interchangeable.  2.  We  have  seen  also  by 
what  infallible  tokens  it  reveals  itself  in  men's  finite 
or  private  consciousness,  namely  :  as  a  free  or  regen- 
erative spiritual  force  in  them  aiming  to  give  them 
life  out  of  death  by  releasing  them  from  their  finite 
limitations,  or  the  bondage  of  their  animal,  vegetable, 
and  mineral  ties  (which  merely  give  men  visible  con- 


HER  TRUE  INFINITING  TENDERNESS.  443 

stitution  or  make  them  phenomenal  to  themselves),  so 
allying  them  at  last  in  conscious  fellowship  with 
God's  spiritual  infinitude. 

But  a  third  point  remains  to  be  considered,  not 
perhaps  of  equal  speculative  importance  with  these, 
but  of  eveh  greater  practical  consequence,  and  that  is, 
briefly  stated  :  What  is  the  machinery  by  which  oiu* 
Divinized  human  nature  vindicates  itself,  or  avouches 
its  existence,  to  the  public  conscience  of  mankind,  so 
inaugurating  the  reign  of  God's  justice  or  righteous- 
ness upon  earth  ? 

—  The  answer  to  this  question,  however,  will  re- 
quire a  letter  to  itself,  but  I  hope  this  letter  will  be  a 
final  one,  and  gather  up  all  that  yet  remains  to  be 
understood  between  us. 


BB^S^^r*^  ^ 

Jlm^ 

1 

^S 

^y 

1 

i^ 

LETTER    XXVIII. 


Y  DEAR  FRIEND :  —  In  my  last  letter  I 
]■  answered,  or  tried  to  answer,  two  ques- 
tions each  of  sovereign  import  to  the 
speculative  welfare  of  philosophy.  The 
first  question  was  about  human  nature  itself,  its  ori- 
gin and  quality.  The  second  led  us  to  consider  its 
method  of  actual  development  to  the  consciousness 
of  its  carnal  votary,  as  conscience,  or  the  negative 
laio  of  human  freedom.  If  you  will  allow  me  now 
briefly  to  resume  or  recapitulate  the  answers  I  gave 
to  these  questions,  bearing  as  they  do  so  profoundly 
on  the  speculative  interests  of  religion  and  philosophy, 
we  shall  both  of  us  be  better  able  to  do  justice  to 
a  third  question  which  we  are  more  particularly 
bound  to  consider  in  the  present  letter,  and  which 
is  of  transcendent  practical  importance  to  the  inter- 
ests, not  of  any  special  science  perhaps,  but  certainly 
to  the  general  science  of  human  life. 

We  saw  then  in  our  last  letter  that  human  nature 


HUMAN  NATUEE  METAPHYSICAL.  445 

is  a  strictly  metaphjsic  existence,  postulating  the 
entire  realm  of  physics  beneath  it  or  under  it  pre- 
cisely as  the  pedestal  is  postulated  in  the  statue,  or 
the  body  in  the  soul:  in  order  adequately  to  base 
it,  that  is,  to  finite  it,  or  give  it  on  its  objective  side 
permanent  fixity  or  isolation.  Human  nature  origi- 
nates spiritually  in  God  who  is  real  or  essential  man, 
and  it  merely  expresses  on  its  inward  or  spiritual 
side  the  ceaseless  eSbrt  of  His  providence  to  manifest 
itself  creatively,  that  is,  to  attain  to  adequate  actual 
or  existential  form  in  His  creature.  The  creature 
of  course  ex  vi  termini  is  in  himself,  or  quel  creatiu'e, 
utterly  "  without  form,  and  void  "  of  distinctive  qual- 
ity, and  any  form  or  quality  he  may  exhibit  therefore 
is  not  attributable  to  himself  but  to  the  creator  in 
him :  unless  indeed  it  be  a  purely  evil  and  fallacious 
form  or  quality,  in  which  case  it  exists  only  to  con- 
sciousness, and  has  no  fibre  of  reality  outside  of  it. 

But  although  God  is  in  truth  most  real  or  es- 
sential man  it  will  not  do  to  infer  that  He  is,  ipso 
facto  merely,  formal  or  existential  man  as  well.  Of 
course  He  who  alone  is  real  or  essential  man  is  ijjso 
facto  also  virtually/  formal  or  existential  man,  since 
there  can  be  no  such  thing  as  an  absolute  divorce 
between  substance  and  form:  but  only  virtually,  or 
in  potency,  not  actually.  His  becoming  actually 
what  He  is  potentially,  or  outwardly  what  He  is  in- 


446  GOD  ALONE  IS  MAN  EITHER 

wardly,  depends  entirely  upon  His  being  creative 
and  thus  having  a  sphere  of  actual  or  outward  mani- 
festation put  within  His  grasp.  For  the  creator  who 
is  real  or  inward  and  essential  man  becomes  actual 
or  outward  and  existential  man  only  through  His 
creatm-e,  or  by  virtue  of  His  first  giving  spiritual 
or  inward  being  to  the  creature.  The  creature  no 
doubt,  unapprised  as  yet  save  by  revelation  of  his 
being  spiritually  created,  or  of  his  having  any  inward 
potency  of  life,  seems  to  himself  to  be  a  most  verid- 
ical actual  man.  But  this  is  all  a  seeming.  For 
he  being  created  is  of  necessity  in  himself  a  mere 
finite  form  or  image  of  humanity;  and  even  as 
such  form  or  image  can  only  reproduce  the  human 
type  in  so  far  as  he  is  freely  united  to  his  brethren : 
which  he  can  never  be,  which  in  fact  he  selfishly 
loathes  to  be,  until  his  proper  interest  tardily  con- 
strains him  to  that  mercenary  policy.  Besides,  as 
I  have  already  intimated,  it  is  illogical  and  stupid 
to  suppose  that  any  one  can  be  actual  or  formal 
man  but  He  who  is  first  real  or  substantial  man. 
For  if  substance  and  form  diff'ered  in  themselves, 
and  not  simply  in  relation  to  a  finite  intelligence, 
creation  would  be  at  a  nonplus.  In  truth  then  God 
alone  is  both  real,  or  inward  and  essential  man,  and 
actual,  or  outward  and  existential  man.  In  short,  He 
alone  is  man  in  substance,  and  man  in  form. 


m  SUBSTANCE  OR  IN  FORM.  447 

Be  it  understood  then  between  us  that  we  our- 
selves, however  truly  we  may  be  said  to  symbolize 
actual  human  nature,  or  typify  formal  manhood,  have 
yet  no  shadow  of  a  claim  to  constitute  such  man- 
hood, any  more  than  we  have  a  shadow  of  claim  to 
constitute  Divinity,  or  real  and  essential  manhood. 
For  we  are  only  at  our  best  finite  phenomenal  men, 
and  neither  singly  nor  in  mass  therefore  can  we  ever 
hope  to  be  that  actual  and  unitary  for??i  of  man, 
which  as  being  correlative  to  its  real  or  essential 
Divine  substance,  must  be  every  way  proportionate 
to  such  substance,  and  therefore  itself  Divine  and 
infinite.  But  though  we  have  no  shadow  of  justifi- 
cation in  so  doing,  we  do  nevertheless  all  the  while 
betray  our  spiritual  ignorance  in  assuming  bona  fide 
to  constitute  the  whole  of  the  formal  and  actual  hu- 
manity which  exists  on  earth,  and  which  in  theory 
reflects  the  inward  and  essential  humanity  of  God : 
thus  and  thereby  baffling  or  indefinitely  retarding 
the  Divine  purpose  (and  indeed  the  Divine  ability) 
eventually  to  show  us  the  spiritual  truth  of  the  case. 
For  God  is  too  wise  and  good  a  being  (since  He  is 
real  or  essential  man)  practically  to  contemn  or  over- 
ride His  creature's  natural  prejudices,  and  very  much 
prefers  to  make  His  creature  also,  like  Himself,  wise 
and  good  by  gradually  illumining  those  natural  preju- 
dices, and  bending  them  to  the  truth. 


448      THE  CREATIVE  POWER  IN  MEN  CONTINGENT 

Allow  me  then  to  repeat  to  you  a  truth  which  we 
have  as  yet  barely  glanced  at,  but  which  is  calcu- 
lated yet  to  shed  an  infinite  amount  of  light  upon 
the  philosophy  of  human  nature  and  human  history. 
That  truth  is  as  follows,  and  I  conjure  you  to  ponder 
it  well  if  you  would  ever  hope  to  master  the  true 
secret  of  the  spiritual  creation :  Although  God  our 
creator  is  real  or  spiritual  and  inward  man,  and  hy 
that  fact  stands  pledged  eventually  to  show  Himself 
sole  actual  or  natural  and  outward  man  also,  never- 
theless His  entire  ability  to  do  this  is  in  strict  abey- 
ance to  His  creature's  good  pleasure  in  the  premisses, 
or  depends  upon  the  human  race  giving  Him  a 
chance  to  accomplish  the  task.  For  He  is  the  ab- 
solute creator  of  men,  and  by  that  very  fact  bound 
in  such  intimate  solidarity  with  them,  that  He  can- 
not bestow  any  of  His  own  potencies  and  felicities 
upon  them  without  their  own  free  consent  and  con- 
currence. Much  less  therefore  can  He  bestow  upon 
them  that  knowledge  of  Himself  as  the  only  true 
subject  of  their  nature  which  is  immortal  life,  so 
long  as  they  each  stupidly  persist  in  maintaining 
that  they  themselves  are  its  sole  true  subjects,  and 
He  himself  consequently  its  sole  undeniable  object. 
We  cannot  hope  then  to  see  God  avouching  himself 
both  inwardly  and  outwardly,  both  really  and  actu- 
ally, both  spiritually  and  naturally,  true  man,  and 


UPON  THEIR  NATURE  TAKING  FORM.  449 

alone  fit  to  bear  the  untarnished  name  of  Man,  until 
the  human  race  becomes  so  fused  icUldn  itself  — 
that  is,  so  constituted  in  felt  or  conscious  unity  with 
itself — as  to  form  a  perfect  society,  brotherhood,  or 
fellowship  of  its  particular  and  universal  elements, 
each  of  its  members  spontaneously  devoting  himself 
to  the  welfare  of  all,  and  all  the  members  in  their 
turn  freely  espousing  the  welfare  of  each. 

Then  doubtless,  and  not  before,  the  creator  of  men 
will  have  become  formal,  existential,  or  natm-al  man 
as  well  as  substantial,  essential,  or  spiritual  man,  and 
you  and  I  will  never  again  be  such  arrant  idiots 
spiritually  as  to  deem  ourselves  God's  true  creatures 
in  our  own  private  right,  or  out  of  social  solidarity 
with  all  other  men.  For  the  great  phenomenon  of 
human  society  —  of  men  made  social  out  of,  and  so 
to  speak  hy  virtue  of,  their  extreme  and  inveterate 
selfishness  —  will  then  strike  every  eye  as  the  con- 
summate miracle  of  God's  spiritual  perfection  in  our 
nature,  and  the  eternally  sufficing  manifestation  of 
His  matchless  adorable  name.  But  until  the  human 
race  attains  to  plenary  social  form  we  may  be  very 
sure  that  as  the  end  of  God's  spiritual  creation  in 
human  nature  meanwhile  must  be  perfectly  obscured 
or  overlaid  by  men's  prevalent  ignorance  and  super- 
stition, so,  much  more,  the  origin  of  that  nature  in 
God's  infinite  love  and  wisdom  will  be  completely 


450  NATURE  THE   SPHERE  OF 

misapprehended,  as  we  see  in  point  of  fact  it  has 
been.  For  men  have  always  been  wont  to  attribute 
any  thing  but  a  Divine  genesis  to  their  nature,  as- 
signing a  purely  a  posteriori  origin  to  it  in  place  of 
an  a  priori  one.  That  is  to  say,  they  make  it  origi- 
nate in  a  gradual  evolution  of  humanity  from  pre- 
cedent mineral,  vegetable,  and  animal  forms :  thus 
in  effect  or  figuratively  making  the  head  of  creation 
take  the  place  of  its  heels,  or  subjecting  soul  to 
body,  statue  to  pedestal,  oyster  to  shell,  ship  to 
sails,  church  to  steeple,  house  to  foundation,  man 
to  clothing. 

Now  let  me  say  that  it  is  nothing  but  this  help- 
lessly carnal  habit  of  mind  in  us  —  this  instinctive 
and  inveterate  tendency  on  our  part  to  envisage  cre- 
ation, not  as  a  spiritual  Divine  life  or  truth  in  man, 
but  only  as  a  dead  material  fact  or  thing  —  which 
forever  condemns  us  in  ourselves  to  a  purely  natural 
or  metaphysic  and  phenomenal  existence;  that  is 
to  say,  to  an  existence  which  is  as  remote  in  itself 
from  spiritual  truth  as  it  is  from  material  fact,  being 
equidistant  from,  and  inaccessible  to,  the  inward 
life  of  the  angel  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  purely  out- 
ward or  sensuous  life  of  the  devil  on  the  other.  And 
the  obvious  reason  of  this  state  of  things :  that  is 
to  say,  the  reason  why  nature  exhibits  this  strictly 
neutral  or  equatorial  quality  —  making  the  divided 


REDEMPTION  IN"   MAN.  451 

hemispheres  of  good  and  evil,  heaven  and  hell,  spirit 
and  flesh,  eternally  spherical  in  itself,  that  is,  making 
them  one  and  equal  as  the  two  opposing  abutments 
of  a  bridge  are  made  one  and  equal  in  the  bridge 
— is  that  the  problem  of  creation  to  the  Divine 
mind,  being  how  eternally  to  reconcile  two  factors, 
creator  and  creature,  which  are  totally  irreconcilable 
in  themselves,  one  being  all  fulness,  the  other  all 
want,  one  all  spirit  or  life,  the  other  all  flesh  or 
death,  inexorably  demands  therefore  for  its  solu- 
tion a  third  or  middle  term  which  shall  be  neutral 
or  indifferent  to  either  factor,  infinite  or  finite,  by 
avouching  itself  a  rigidly  indefinite  or  universal  quan- 
tity as  the  unity  of  each  and  all.  Accordingly  this 
requisite  and  accommodating  middle  term  which 
actually  solves  the  creative  problem  is  supplied 
by  human  nature.  Human  nature  impartially  solves 
the  creative  problem,  because  while  it  is  absolutely 
neutral  or  rather  altogether  negative  with  respect  to 
either  interest,  creative  or  created,  i7i  se,  it  is  there- 
fore most  positive  or  affirmative  with  respect  to 
both  as  they  become  conjoined  in  living  unity.  The 
method  of  this  conjunction,  from  which  the  spirit- 
ual creation  results,  arises  from  the  gradual  experi- 
mental conversion  of  the  principle  of  self  in  man, 
the  evil  principle,  which  represents  the  finite  man, 
into  the  principle  of  society  or  fellowship,  the  good 


452  THE  INWARD  MEANING  OF  CREATION 

principle,  which  represents  the  infinite  humanity,  so 
making  God  and  man  naturally,  as  they  always  have 
been  spiritually,  one. 

This  then  is  an  explicit  statement  of  what  I  im- 
plicitly said  about  nature  in  the  last  letter ;  but  after 
all  it  is  an  account  of  nature  on  its  theoretic  rather 
than  its  practical  side,  or  as  it  exists  to  the  mind 
of  its  author  only  and  not  as  it  appears  to  a  finite 
dependent  intelligence.  Practically  then,  or  to  the 
finite  mind,  nature,  as  I  went  on  to  say  in  that  letter, 
reveals  itself  not,  to  be  sure,  in  its  own  perfect  or 
consummate  spiritual  way,  as  an  undefined  or  uni- 
versal form,  being  the  unity  of  the  whole  and  its 
parts,  but  in  the  specific  form  of  conscience,  or  the 
law  upon  which  man's  natural  freedom  is  negatively 
conditioned,  the  purpose  of  conscience  being  to  re- 
deem him  out  of  the  bondage  he  is  under  by  birth 
to  his  physical  organization,  and  so  qualify  him  for 
social  or  distinctively  human  form,  which  is  the  only 
form  commensurate  with  the  spiritual  Divine  per- 
fection or  infinitude.  In  other  words  creation  in  its 
finite  natural  aspect,  its  aspect  towards  the  carnal 
creature,  necessarily  wears  the  appearance  of  an  eman- 
cipating, spirituahzing,  or  redemptive  operation,  di- 
vorcing the  creature  from  the  organic  bondage  to 
which  he  is  born  subject,  and  investing  him  instead 
with  moral  and  rational  freedom. 


IS  MAN'S  DELIVERANCE  FROM  EVIL.  453 

But  here  I  must  beg  you  to  note  with  most 
minute  attention  one  thing,  which  is :  that  morality 
and  rationality,  althouyh  they  separate  man  from  ani- 
mal, and  thereby  qualify  Mm  to  take  the  name  of 
man,  yet  they  do  this  only  provisionally.  They  do  not 
invest  him  with  absolute,  but  only  with  phenomenal, 
manhood,  making  his  real  participation  of  human 
nature  altogether  contingent  upon  his  personal  hu- 
mility, or  the  degree  in  which  he  freely  admits  the 
neighbor  to  a  first  place  in  his  habitual  regard,  and 
limits  himself  to  the  second  place.  Freedom  and 
rationality  by  no  means  give  any  of  us  a  title  to 
the  Divine  potencies  and  felicities  which  inhere  in 
human  nature ;  they  only  make  him,  or  inscribe 
him  as,  a  candidate  for  such  title.  In  short  they 
give  man  a  quasi  or  mere  negative  and  seeming  nat- 
ural consciousness,  by  no  means  a  real  or  positive 
one,  and  hence  they  do  not  guarantee  him  the  spir- 
itual Divine  being  of  which  human  nature  is  the 
sole  possible  vehicle  whether  to  man  or  angel. 

For  example.  My  moral  manhood,  which  stands 
in  my  felt  freedom  of  will  to  choose  between  good 
and  evil,  is  not  absolute  but  contingent  or  condi- 
tional: being  rigidly  conditioned  upon  my  actually 
choosing  good.  If,  as  some  persons  not  very  clear- 
sighted are  wont  to  pretend,  my  will  cannot  feel 
itself  free  to  do  one  thins  unless  it  feel  itself  also 


454  MAN'S  FREEDOM  AND  EATIONALITY 

free  at  the  same  time  to  do  the  exact  contrary  thing, 
I  would  not  call  this  latter  faculty  by  the  sacred 
name  of  freedom,  but  by  that  of  bondage,  since  it 
can  be  exercised  only  at  the  expense  of  renouncing 
one's  manhood.  My  moral  manhood  depends,  and  de- 
pends absolutely,  ujpon  my  felt  freedom  alioays  to 
take  the  side  of  good  in  preference  to  evil  whenever 
and  wherever  I  find  them  conflicting,  and  never  the 
side  of  evil  in  preference  to  good.  Thus  if  in  case 
of  conflict  I  actually  choose  evil,  or  prefer  it  to  good, 
my  moral  or  provisional  manhood  not  only  turns  out 
an  actual  sham,  but  by  the  foreclosure  of  the  condition 
on  which  its  entire  possibility  ivas  based,  sinks  below 
animality  even,  and  becomes  frankly  evil  or  diabolic. 
It  is  true,  I  may  not  in  so  doing  recognize  that  I 
am  incurring  a  forfeiture  of  all  human  possibilities, 
and  probably  shall  not,  going  on  indeed  to  prate  of 
my  superb  and  lustrous  manhood  even  after  I  have 
shut  myself  up  in  hell.  But  this  will  be  simply 
because  manhood  is  an  inward  not  an  outward  form 
or  quality,  and  therefore  only  to  be  inwardly  dis- 
cerned, whereas  I  in  the  circumstances  supposed 
am  really  or  inwardly  knavish  not  human,  and  rec- 
ognize manhood  therefore  only  as  accomphshed 
knavery. 

In  like   manner  precisely   my  rational  manhood, 
which  stands  in  the  freedom  of  my  understanding 


DO   NOT   MAKE   HIM   MAN  :  455 

to  discriminate  the  true  from  tlie  false,  proves  itself 
no  manhood  at  all,  but  the  veriest  monkeyhood  and 
mockery  of  humanity,  if  I  forbear  to  exert  it,  or 
devoutly  exercise  myself  in  it,  htj  actually  loving  ike 
true  and  rejecting  the  false.  To  be  sure,  as  some 
of  our  egregious  logic-choppers  counsel  me  to  do,  I 
may  interpret  my  moral  and  rational  manhood  into 
a  state  of  utter  serene  indifference  with  respect  to 
the  rival  claims  of  good  and  evil  upon  my  heart, 
and  the  rival  claims  of  truth  and  falsity  upon  my 
understanding.  But  in  that  event  my  vaunted  moral 
and  rational  manhood  turns  out  a  mere  faculty  to 
prefer  good  or  evil,  truth  or  falsity,  at  my  own  un- 
godly pleasure.  In  which  case  my  moral  manhood 
is  my  right  to  do  just  as  I  please,  without  regard 
to  any  holier  or  higher  law.  In  other  words  it  ex- 
presses my  actual  independence  both  of  God  and 
man.  But  this  is  a  manhood  which  can  never  come 
from  God,  for  there  is  no  fibre  of  foundation  for  it 
in  the  whole  range  of  His  perfection.  He  himself 
has  no  independence  of  action,  and  He  could  never 
impart  to  His  creature  therefore  what  He  did  not 
Himself  possess.  His  inmost  life  is  dependent  upon 
His  actually  equalizing  His  creature  with  Himself, 
or  making  Himself  over  to  the  latter  in  all  the  plen- 
itude of  His  resources.  And  all  His  action  is  con- 
strained by  this  unselfish  end,  and  addressed  unfal- 


456  THEY  MERELY  QUALIFY 

teringly  to  its  promotion.  Any  freedom  or  man- 
hood therefore  which  looks  towards  independence,  or 
makes  the  moral  and  rational  subject  his  own  law, 
should  be  indignantly  spurned  by  him  as  a  base 
infernal  counterfeit  of  the  true  Divine  manhood. 
That  a  man  in  loving  good  should  feel  himself  free 
to  love  its  opposite  can  only  be  possible  on  one  of 
two  conditions :  Either  good  and  evil  must  be  at 
bottom  identical,  and  differ  only  in  name;  which 
is  an  hypothesis  too  obviously  stupid  to  invite  con- 
sideration :  or  else  the  man  does  not  honestly  love 
good  but  for  some  temporary  motive  is  willing  to 
make  a  pretence  of  loving  it :  and  this  hypothesis 
thoroughly  vitiates  the  problem,  or  reduces  it  to 
actual  insignificance,  by  changing  its  terms.  I  do 
not  deny  of  course  that  a  man  may  actually  or  out- 
wardly take  tea,  when  he  really  or  inwardly  prefers 
coffee.  But  that  while  he  prefers  coffee  he  should 
also  feel  himself  free  to  prefer  tea,  is  plainly  a  phe- 
nomenon referring  itself  to  that  grotesque  world 
imagined  by  the  late  hard-headed  but  warm-hearted 
Mr.  Mill,  which  no  sun  enlightens,  but  where  a 
mild  moonshine  reigns  supreme,  and  even  the  vir- 
tuous multiplication  table  grows  wanton  and  indul- 
gent, permitting  all  its  tender  mathematical  nurs- 
lings to  say  twice  two  are  five,  and  if  five,  why  not 
fifty? 


HIM  TO   BECOME  MAN.  457 

At  any  rate  there  is  no  such  freedom  as  that  here 
combated  in  God,  and  there  can  be  no  appearance 
of  it  in  man  His  creature  save  as  a  diabohc  illusion.* 
Whatever  his  silly  creature  may  do  in  the  premisses, 


*  Swedenborg  accordingly  traces  the  existence  of  tlie  hells  to  the 
strength  of  this  illusion  in  men,  and  this  undeniably  is  a  sufficient 
foundation  for  them.  That  is  to  say,  the  hells  simply  mean  —  nothing 
more  and  nothing  less  —  the  enforced  or  obligatory  companionship  of 
all  those  among  men  who  feel  no  inward  liaison,  or  Divine-humau  bond 
of  cohesion,  drawing  them  to  unity,  and  hence  depend  for  their  highest 
happiness  upon  the  activity  of  the  prudential  instinct  in  them,  or  a 
life  involving  the  perpetual  balance  of  hope  and  fear.  And  if  men 
really  persuade  themselves  that  their  Divinely  given  manhood  or  free- 
dom involves  the  power  of  being  good  or  evil  at  their  own  pleasure, 
I  cannot  for  my  part  see  that  the  hells  are  not  the  logical  spontaneous 
outcome  of  such  a  persuasion.  In  fact  their  existence  at  once  ceases 
to  be  a  mystery,  and  becomes  an  open  exigency  of  human  welfare,  an 
obvious  inevitable  necessity  of  man's  natural  development.  For  human 
nature,  or  the  human  race,  is  absolutely  conditioned  for  its  develop- 
ment upon  man's  power  to  love  God  (tliat  is,  infinite  goodness  and 
truth)  apparentli/,  but  not  really,  of  himself;  or  as  Swedenborg  writ- 
ing in  Latin  prefers  to  say,  as  of  himself,  but  not  of  himself.  For  if 
man  spontaneously  loved  goodness,  loved  it  of  his  own  natural  force, 
he  would  be  God,  and  no  longer  a  creature  of  God ;  and  yet,  so  long 
as  he  does  not  love  God  or  goodness  of  himself,  if  lie  did  not  at  the 
same  time  love  Him  apparentli/  of  himself,  or  as  of  himself,  he  would 
not  even  have  a  negative  approximation  to  his  creative  source,  much  less 
furnish  a  background  or  basis  to  the  Divine  being  for  the  development 
of  human  nature.  And  failing  both  a  positive  and  negative  relation  to 
God,  of  course  the  man  can  have  no  reality  in  him,  spiritual  or  natural, 
and  must  remain  the  subject  of  a  mere  illusory  or  fantastic  existence : 
and  to  be  such  a  subject  is  to  be  a  hell  in  least  or  miniature  form. 


458  GOD   IS   ENTIRELY  WITHOUT  A   POWER 

or  rather  boast  himself  of  doing,  God  at  least  has 
no  privilege  of  arbitrary  or  capricious  action,  because 
He  has  not  the  slightest  power  to  do  as  He  pleases, 
or  make  Himself  into  His  own  end  of  action.  For 
God,  as  I  have  often  enough  said  already,  is  essen- 
tially creative,  creative  by  the  whole  force  of  His 
being;  and  His  action  therefore  is  inexorably  under 
law  to  the  welfare  of  His  creature.  He  is  not  cre- 
ative from  any  inspiration  of  the  head  merely,  that 
is,  morally  or  voluntarily  creative,  as  either  from  a 
sense  of  duty  to  His  creatures,  or  from  a  sense  of 
what  is  expedient  with  a  view  to  enliven  His  own 
solitude,  or  better  His  own  condition  in  any  way; 
for  His  creatures  have  their  being  wholly  in  Him, 
and  consequently  can  impose  no  outward  obligation 
upon  Him,  and  He  himself  consequently  has  no  ex- 
istence save  in  His  creatures,  and  can  therefore  feel 
no  obligation  to  act  with  a  view  to  the  improvement 
of  His  own  independent  circumstances.  Neither  is 
He  aesthetically  creative,  like  the  artist,  that  is,  cre- 
ative from  the  hand,  through  taste  or  overpowering 
attraction :  for  His  taste  would  utterly  revolt  from 
producing  such  loathsome  vermin  as  His  creatures 
are  bound  to  be  in  their  finite  selves,  if  like  the  art- 
ist's creations  those  finite  selves  were  unhappily  to 
know  no  natural  renewing.  He  is  creative  therefore 
only  from  the  heart,  that  is,  freely  or  spontaneously 


OF  INDEPENDENT  ACTION.  459 

creative,  creative  in  liimself,  or  with  His  whole  vital 
energy:  which  insures  in  the  first  place  that  His 
inmost  life  lies  in  communicating  His  own  deathless 
being  to  the  creature,  that  is,  His  own  infinite  and 
eternal  potencies,  felicities,  and  beatitudes,  and  then 
that  all  His  innocent  wisdom  will  go  to  supplant  or 
render  superfluous  the  wretched  5^^-righteousness  of 
the  creature,  in  endowing  him  first  of  all  with  a 
righteous  nature,  or  stable  constitutional  basis  of  ex- 
istence, whence  he  in  his  turn  may  every  way  freely 
or  spontaneously  react  to  the  interior  creative  im- 
pulsion. 

We  see  then  that  the  creator  does  not,  and  abso- 
lutely cannot,  spiritually  exist  save  in  His  creature. 
A  fortiori  therefore  He  has  no  power  to  make  His 
own  pleasure  the  law  of  His  action,  unless  the  bless- 
edness of  his  creature  be  always  subsumed  in  that 
pleasure  as  its  total  substance  and  root.  Thus  He 
is  absolutely  inhibited  by  His  essential  infinitude  or 
freedom  from  making  self  the  end  of  His  action,  or 
ever  doing  under  any  circumstances  as  He  pleases, 
without  reference  indeed  to  everybody  else's  welfare. 
He  cheerfully  allows  us  a  monopoly  of  that  saddest 
and  most  vulgar  delight.  For  he  who  is  essentially 
free  or  infinite  as  being  creative,  abjures  all  empirical, 
or  felt  conscious  and  phenomenal,  freedom,  because 
He  is  absolutely  without  selfhood,  and  has  no  contact 


460  OUR  MORAL  AND  RATIONAL  MANHOOD 

with  the  unclean  thing  save  in  His  creatures.  All 
His  infinitude  or  freedom  is  mortgaged  to  the  neces- 
sity of  bringing  His  creature  to  ripe  natural  or 
spontaneous  manhood,  and  only  when  that  burden  is 
accomplished  and  that  most  Divine  pleasure  realized 
will  He  enjoy  His  first  faint  chance  of  seeing  Him- 
self reflected  —  in  the  happiness  of  His  creature. 

Very  well  then :  our  moral  and  rational  manhood 
is  not  our  natural  manhood,  but  only  a  distorted  and 
diffracted  image  of  that  unitary  substance  as  seen  in 
the  mirror  of  our  divided  and  discordant  personalities. 
It  is  a  similitude  of  our  natural  manhood,  a  sort  of 
photographic  negative  of  it,  by  whose  constant  school- 
ing the  Divine  Artist  prepares  and  leads  us  eventually 
to  descry  and  detect  the  positive  truth  upon  the  sub- 
ject. It  is  a  similitude  or  semblance  which  we  in- 
deed are  long  content  to  mistake  for  the  reality,  but 
this  comes  of  our  never  having  yet  known  the  reality 
by  living  contact,  but  only  by  hearsay.  It  is  true 
that  the  reality  once  made  itself  known  to  men  in 
a  general  prophetic  way  through  a  very  remarkable 
historic  person,  miraculously  born  at  a  great  crisis 
of  the  church's  history,  when  the  church  itself  was 
putting  off  her  ritual  or  ceremonial  dress,  and  taking 
on  actual  flesh-and-blood  substance.  But  the  great 
and  merciful  truth  at  that  time  clothed  itself  in  such 
weak,  dejected,  dying  literal  form,  that  though  its 


NOT  A  REAL  BUT  A  TYPICAL  MANHOOD.         461 

perfect  humanity  was  seen,  men  have  always  been 
afraid  to  argue  from  that  to  its  equally  perfect  divin- 
ity, and  have  been  content  instead  simply  to  cherish 
the  ecclesiastical  tradition  on  that  subject.*     On  his 


*  This  tradition  does  not  appear  to  have  profited  men  mucli  intellec- 
tually, but  doubtless  it  has  kept  their  memory,  which  is  the  porch  of  the 
mind,  open  to  the  admission  of  the  spiritual  truth  on  the  subject.  I 
remember  a  good  many  years  ago  conversing  on  this  topic  with  a  highly 
valued  friend,  who  was  besides  a  very  distinguished  name  in  literature. 
And  he  said  in  reply  to  an  account  I  had  been  giving  him  of  Sweden- 
borg's  intellectual  position  with  respect  to  the  Christian  revelation : 
The  fatal  critlcisiii  upon  C/irisfs  jirefeiisioii  to  Diciuifi/  will  always  be  the 
fact  of  his  having  ignominiousli/  succumbed  to  his  persecutors,  when  if  his 
personal  pretension  were  well  founded  he  ought  to  have  annihilated  them. 
If  Christ  had  ever  authentically  revealed  Deity,  he  would  have  fashed 
home  the  conviction  of  his  truth  to  every  man  that  saw  him,  in  sheer 
despite  too  of  the  maiUs  stro7igest  rational  prepossessions  to  the  contrary. 
I  ventured  to  rejoin,  that  my  friend's  own  notion  upon  the  subject  seemed 
to  reduce  poor  deity  to  what  the  French  woidd  call  an  impasse  within 
his  own  creation,  or  what  our  own  rustics  would  call  "  a  very  hard  fix," 
inasmuch  as  it  neither  allows  him  to  become  known  in  himself,  nor  yet 
permits  him  to  reveal  himself  to  men's  knowledge  in  the  nature  of  his 
creature,  without  effcetually  blighting  at  the  same  time  all  that  makes 
that  nature  respectable,  namely,  the  creature's  freedom  and  rationality. 
This  freedom  and  rationality,  which  alone  give  the  creature  a  conscious- 
ness of  manhood,  are  however  what  actually  prevent  his  ever  truly 
knowing  God,  for  he  both  instinctively  and  deliberately  claims  these 
superb  attributes  as  proper  to  himself  or  his  own  absolutely,  and  not 
exclusively  as  God^s  attributes  in  his  common  nature.  A  revelation  from 
God  accordingly  which  should  involve  the  least  practical  dishonor  to 
these  attributes  in  man,  is  not  to  be  thought  of  as  possible.  In  fact 
the  only  revelation  at  all  possible  or  thinkable  from  God  to  man,  is 
one  which  conciliates  every  man's  private  freedom  and  rationality  to  it. 


462  CHRIST   CRUCIFIED  THE  ONLY  ADEQUATE 

Jewish  side  of  course,  which  related  him  to  a  purely 
typical  or  figurative  economy,  Christ  was  bound  to  be 
accursed  both  of  God  and  man ;  for  his  personal  pre- 
tension as  the  Jewish  Messiah,  sent  to  deliver  his 
brethren  according  to  the  flesh  from  bondage,  and 
exalt  them  to  the  supremacy  of  the  nations,  was  as 
full  of  inward  blasphemy  toAvards  the  Divine  name, 
as  it  was  full  of  outward  contempt  towards  the  human 
race.  It  w^as  only  in  his  crucified  aspect  accordingly 
that  he  vindicates  the  spiritual  truth  of  his  mission, 
or  allows  any  trace  of  his  divinity  to  appear ;  for  here 
he  is  seen,  in  open  contempt  of  every  most  sacred 
national  tradition,  sternly  rejecting  from  himself  a 
Jewish  humanity,  and  putting  on  a  universal  one,  that 
is,  one  which  should  be  neither  Jewish  nor  Gentile, 
but  broadly  unitary  or  universal,  to  the  effacing  of  all 
literal  discriminations  whatever  among  men. 

But  I  have  not  taken  so  much  pains  to  prove  to 
you :  that  our  moral  and  rational  manhood  is  not  a 
real  manhood,  but  a  quasi  one,  intended  only  as  a 
preparation  for  our  real  or  natural  manhood  when  it 
comes :  altogether  for  its  own  sake,  but  with  a  view 
also  to  get  some  needed  light  upon  the  answer  to  our 
third  question,  which  it  is  high  time  we  were  con- 
by  showing  that  God  himself  is  the  sole  aud  iiifiuite  substance  of  these 
attributes,  only  in  natural  or  impersonal,  that  is,  universal  aud  unitary, 
human  form. 


KEVELATION  OF  GOD   IN   HUMANITY.  463 

sideriiig.  Our  actual  manhood  as  we  have  seen  is  an 
altogether  provisional  one  intended  to  serve  as  a  mere 
scaffolding  to  our  natural  manhood,  as  a  mere  foil  or 
set-off  to  it  when  it  is  ready  to  appear  in  its  own 
infinite  Divine  lustre ;  and  I  have  thought  that  by 
first  famiharizing  your  imagination  somewhat  with 
this  mighty  truth  I  might  assist  you  to  a  fuller  com- 
prehension of  the  answer  I  am  about  to  give  to  the 
question  now  before  us.  That  question  may  be  for- 
nuilated  thus :  What  precise  macliinery  does  human 
nature  require  in  order  historically  to  avouch  itself,  or 
authenticate  itself  to  the  public  conscience  of  men,  as 
THE  world's  sole  LIFE :  SO  at  loug  kst  harmonizing 
the  finite,  phenomenal,  or  merely  conscious  man  with 
God's  spiritual  infinitude  or  freedom  ? 

The  machinery  of  human  nature  by  which  it  ulti- 
mates  its  proper  life,  turning  all  history  into  its  obe- 
dient vehicle,  and  filling  the  entire  public  conscious- 
ness of  men  with  its  renown,  is  solely  made  up  of 
what  we  call  the  church  and  the  ivorld.  These  terms, 
however,  remember,  express  no  objective  but  a  purely 
subjective  reality  in  man ;  or  what  is  the  same  thing 
they  neither  of  them  indicate  a  physical  or  material, 
but  on  the  contrary  a  purely  metaphysical  or  imma- 
terial, substance  in  humanity.  And  a  purely  metaphys- 
ical or  immaterial  substance  in  humanity  can  only  be 
A  MIND.     This  accordingly  is  what  the  church  and  the 


4G4    THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  WORLD  PURELY 

loorld  mean,  a  jpurely  mental  or  subjective  realitij  in 
man;  the  former  term  being  employed  to  designate  in 
those  to  whom  it  is  applied  affections  turned  heaven- 
ward ;  the  latter,  affections  tmnied  earthward :  "  the 
church,"  in  other  words,  characterizing  the  sphere  of 
man's  progressive  mental  development,  "  the  world  " 
the  sphere  of  his  arrested  mental  development.  The 
whole  of  humanity  is  comprised  in  these  two  forms 
of  man's  mental  subjectivity.  A  man  must  neces- 
sarily have  his  affections  turned  towards  heaven,  or 
confined  to  earth,  and  according  as  either  is  the  case 
with  him,  he  is  a  least  or  miniature  form  either  of  the 
church,  or  the  world.  The  church  of  course  tends  to 
issue  spiritually  in  a  heaven  made  up  of  inwardly 
regenerate  men,  and  the  world  in  its  turn  to  issue 
in  a  coequal  hell  made  up  of  inwardly  Regenerate 
men,  so  that  unless  the  Divine  power  had  effectually 
ultimated  itself  in  human  nature,  and  thereby  broken 
up  this  fatal  spiritual  equilibrium,  heaven  and  hell 
must  have  practically  forever  divided  the  spiritual 
world  between  them,  and  forever  have  given  the  lie 
consequently  to  the  sovereign  truth  of  God's  creative 
infinitude. 

Nothing,  I  venture  to  say,  can  be  imagined  more  re- 
volting to  our  humanitary  instincts  of  such  infinitude 
than  the  perfectly  veracious  or  unexaggerated  pictures 
which  Swedenborg's  phlegmatic  genius  gives   us  of 


SUBJECTIVE  REALITIES  IN  MAN.  4G5 

what  he  witnessed  among  oiu*  post-mortem  friends  and 
cronies.  If  the  friend  or  crony  in  question  had  been  on 
earth  a  reverential  person,  and  now  consequently  had 
his  lot  among  the  angels,  Swedenborg  invariably  found 
that  the  man's  natural  imbecility,  or  insufficiency  to 
himself,  had  undergone  no  change  through  the  event  of 
death,  the  man  being  all  the  while  spiritually  restrained 
from  the  frankest  pt^'ojligacy  solel//  by  the  providence  of 
God  exerted  towards  him  through  ancjelic  association. 
And  if,  on  the  other  hand,  our  deceased  acquaintance 
had  been  on  earth  an  habitual  votary  of  self  and  the 
world,  and  therefore  inwardly  a  mocker  of  God  and 
the  neighbor,  so  that  he  now  found  himself  to  his 
great  delight  enrolled  among  the  lowest  of  the  low, 
Swedenborg  nevertheless  invariably  discovers  that  the 
fellow's  braggart  selfhood  is  at  bottom  a  pure  hallu- 
cination or  sham,  dependent  every  moment  for  its  illu- 
sory existence  upon  hellish  influx  and  association,  and 
tolerated  only  for  some  transient  incidental  use  pro- 
moted by  it  to  other  existence. 

Could  any  thing  then  well  be  more  hideous  and 
implacable  to  human  pity  than  such  a  picture  of  men's 
celestial  or  infernal  possibilities,  if  the  picture  were 
intended  to  represent  an  eternal  reality  ?  The  picture 
to  be  sure  was  not  intended  to  represent  an  eternal 
reality,  but  we  see  from  it  excellently  well  what  the 
eternal   reality  must   have   been  (only  much  worse), 


4GG  THEY   ARE  THE  SIMPLE  MACHINERY 

if  the  true  sphere  of  the  creative  infinitude  had  not 
been  reahzed  in  our  nature.  Now  the  evolution  of 
man's  natural  destiny,  and  with  it  consequently  his 
participation  of  immortal  life,  has  been  strictly  iden- 
tical with  the  growth  of  the  civilized  State,  that  is, 
with  the  growth  of  our  earthly  life  out  of  absolute 
bondage  to  the  material  elements  of  nature  into  a  con- 
dition of  free  citizenship :  so  that  we  may  say  with 
entire  truth  that  the  advent  of  this  (prospectively)  free 
State  of  man  on  earth  under  which  we  have  the  hap- 
piness to  live,  has  been  the  fruit  of  a  gradually  fiercer 
attrition  between  the  church  and  the  world,  and  of 
that  exclusively. 

The  two  universally  recognized  elements  then  of 
our  Christian  civilization,  which  are  the  church  and 
the  world,  make  up  between  them  that  requisite  ma- 
chinery of  human  nature  by  whose  conflicting  yet  con- 
current play  it  finally  avouches  itself  the  supreme  law 
of  man's  activity.  I  do  not  say,  mind  you,  that  the 
church  and  the  world  are  in  the  least  identical  with 
human  nature,  or  that  they  have  any  claim  to  a  parti- 
cle of  her  Divine  prestige  and  dignity.  God  forbid  ! 
All  I  say  is  that  they  constitute  the  mere  machinery 
of  human  nature  by  which  it  gradually  works  itself 
out  to  the  light  of  day.  They  are  the  simple  machineri/ 
of  its  evolution  by  which  it  eventually  succeeds  in 
bringing  itself  to  men's  recognition  as  the  conditio 


OF  OUR  NATURAL  EVOLUTION.         467 

sine  qua  non  of  their  Divine  and  immortal  life.     Their 
sole  historic  or  Providential  purpose  has  been  to  serve 
as  a  platform  to  the  development  of  men's  real  or 
natural  consciousness,  as  utterly  distinct  from  and  in- 
veterately  hostile  to  their  phenomenal  or  personal  con- 
sciousness \  and  when  this  use  has  been  accomplished 
they  are  bound,  both  of  them,  to  tumble  off  into  "  the 
condition  of  weeds  and  worn-out  faces."     Thus  the 
church  and  the  world  bear  to  each  other  the  relation 
of  base  and  superstructure,  or  negative  and  positive 
conditions  of  one  and  the  same  metaphysic  result,  that 
result  being  the  evolution  of  humanity,  or  of  men's 
natural   consciousness   in  orderly  social   form.     The 
incessant   attrition   to  which  these   base  mechanical 
factors  of  human  nature  are  doomed  by  their  fierce 
mutual  antagonism,  is  practically  obviated  in  great 
part  by  their  engendering  between  them  what  we  term 
the  civilized  State  of  man,  as  a  temporary  compromise 
between  creature  and  creator,  or  a  richly  provisional 
outcome  of  human  destiny  while  the  social  form  of  our 
nature  is  still  unachieved,  or  its  grand  consummate 
celestial  flower  is  still  in  abeyance  to  the  coarse  earthly 
necessities  of  leaf,  and  stem,  and  roots.     And  they 
both  appear  at  last  so  approximately  humanized,  or 
weaned  of  their  inveterate  animosity,  in  their  child  the 
State,  but  especially  in  their  grandchild,  which  is  the 
free  State  or  republic,  that  although  they  have  neither 


468  THE  EXISTING  WORLD-WIDE 

of  them  the  least  intrinsic  fitness  to  guide  or  control 
human  destiny,  they  have  yet  somehow  had  the  art  or 
address  to  perpetuate  their  bad  empire  over  the  hu- 
man mind  down  to  this  very  day. 

This  in  fact  is  to-day  the  world-wide  tragedy  of 
human  life.  Human  life,  even  now  when  its  social 
ideal  is  so  imperfectly  realized  even  in  thought,  would 
be  a  tolerably  clean  and  reputable  thing,  were  not  its 
honest  interests  so  foully  complicated  with  those  of 
the  self-righteous  church  and  the  selfish,  servile  world. 
This  metaphysic  machinery  of  human  nature,  instead 
of  any  longer  unconsciously  promoting  its  evolution, 
has  consciously  undertaken  to  stifle  it  by  compressing 
its  nascent  activity.  That  is  to  say,  the  church  and 
the  world,  in  the  persons  of  their  more  astute  adepts, 
have  begun  dimly  to  feel  that  their  joint  offspring,  the 
civilized  State  of  man,  was  never  intended  by  God's 
providence  to  be  a  finality  in  human  history.  I  don't 
mean  to  say  that  worldly  and  ecclesiastical  minds, 
however  astute  they  may  be,  have  the  least  intellectual 
insight  of  God's  truth  upon  this  subject.  I  have  n't 
the  slightest  idea,  myself,  that  they  have  any  intel- 
lectual discernment  of  the  entirely  provisional  or  provi- 
dential character  of  our  existing  civilization,  in  that  it 
was  intended  to  base  a  Divine-fiafural  evolution  of 
human  life,  and  disappear  bag  and  baggage  when  that 
end  is  accomplished.     But  these  secular  and  ecclesi- 


TRAGEDY   OF   HUMAN  LIFE  4G9 

astical  minds  are  at  least  in  sensible  contact  with  the 
actual  facts  and  leading  providential  tendencies  of  the 
time,  and  their  own  inordinate  self-love  and  love  of 
rule  insure  that  none  shall  feel  so  keenly  as  they  the 
gathering  clouds  that  arc  rolling  up  from  within  over 
the  technical  State,  erelong  to  descend  in  floods  of 
devouring  rain,  hail,  and  tempest  upon  the  devoted 
heads  of  those  whose  hope  in  God  is  limited  to  it. 
Hence  their  present  persistent  efforts  to  perpetuate 
and  extend  their  empire,  by  appealing  no  longer  to 
the  political  or  civic  conscience  of  men  for  support, 
but  to  the  hopes  and  fears  of  the  private  or  personal 
consciousness. 

This  however  is  a  gross  usurpation.  Neither  church 
nor  world  has  a  shadow  of  claim  upon  men's  individual 
respect  and  attention,  save  in  so  far  as  men  first  of  all 
have  a  purely  superstitious  regard  for  the  State  as  a 
finality  of  God's  earthly  providence.  Nothing  can  be 
more  preposterous  than  this  baleful  superstition.  The 
State  has  no  permanent  or  absolute  rights  over  the 
human  conscience.  It  was  never  intended,  as  I  have 
already  shown,  for  any  thing  else  than  a  mere  locum 
tcnens,  a  simple  herald  or  lieutenant,  to  Society,  while 
Society  itself  was  as  yet  wholly  unrecognized,  and 
indeed  undreamt  of,  as  the  sole  intellectual  truth  of 
man's  Divine-natural  destiny.  And  the  church  mean- 
while as  the  genitor  of  this  temporary  civihzed  State 


470  IS  THAT  CHURCH  AND  WORLD  PERSIST 

of  man,  has  no  other  office  in  the  name  of  the  celes- 
tial or  paternal  providence  that  presides  over  it,  than 
prophetically  to  promise  every  man  a  mens  sana,  that 
is,   a  sound  mind.     Neither  has  the  world,   as   the 
genitrix  of  the  State,  any  other  office  derived  from  the 
earthly  or  maternal  providence  involved  in  the  State, 
than   prophetically  to   promise  every  man  a   corpus 
saniim,  that  is,  a  sound  body,  wherein  his  mens  sana 
may  house  itself  with  comfort,  and  exercise  its  power 
unimpeded.     But  no  one  has  ever  been  such  an  abject 
noodle  as  to  maintain  that  this  Divine  prophecy  and 
promise  in  behalf  of  universal  man  kept  up  by  the 
church  and  the  world,  were  ever  intended  to  be  ful- 
filled by  the  merely  instituted  State  of  man,  that  is, 
by  a  regimen  of  mere  citizenship,  in  which  the  con- 
science of  men  should  be  persistently  held  submissive 
to  tutors  and  governors.     At  all  events,  the  actual 
facts  of  the  case  must  soon  disenchant  him.     For  no 
fact  is  more  notorious  than  that  there  is  actually  no 
man  within  the  precincts  of  civilization  possessing  an 
absolutely  healthy  mind,  or  an  absolutely  healthy  body. 
In  truth  the  church  and  the  world,  in  generating  civil- 
ization, have  had  a  purely  prophetic  relation  to  the 
human  mind,  and  no  pretension  can  be  more  utterly 
absurd  on  their  part  than  to  claim  any  relevancy  to 
man's  living  or  spiritual  consciousness.     They  have 
never  had  the  slightest  claim  to  human  respect  in 


IN   BURROWING  IN  MEN'S  PRIVATE  CONSCIENCE.     471 

themselves,  but  only  in  producing  their  joint  offspring, 
the  State.  They  rightfully  end  or  merge  in  her  forma- 
tion, and  have  no  logical  pretension  to  survive  it  a 
single  instant.  Above  all  and  at  this  day  they  have  no 
particle  of  right  to  arrogate  the  least  control  over  the 
mind  of  any  man  who  does  not  conscientiously  iden- 
tify his  manhood  with  the  State,  or  limit  it  to  good 
citizenship,  so  forever  rejecting  the  invitations  of  in- 
finite goodness  and  truth. 

For  this  empirical  State  of  man,  whereby  he  is 
providentially  led  into  accurate  self-knowledge,  and 
so  prepared  for  an  immortal  destiny,  is  with  us  —  as 
our  constitutional  polity  as  a  community  announces 
— functus  officio,  or  thoroughly  exanimate  as  to  the 
beneficent  spiritual  uses  which  once  consecrated   it 
to  men's  respect.     Our  constitutional  polity  as  a  com- 
munity  makes  no  provision  for  priest  or  king,  which 
seem  essential   to   the  State  in  its  merely  political 
form,  and  we  may   not   unreasonably  infer   accord- 
ingly that  the  State  mider  these  skies  is  casting  its 
old  political  skin,  and  putting  on  one  which  is  more 
decidedly  flexible,  and  congruous  with  the  perfected  or 
social  form  of  our  nature.    In  other  words :  the  common  K 
life  of  man  in  this  hemisphere  is  undergoing  a  marked  ^. 
formal  or  providential  change,  in  ceasing  any  longer  \ 
to  acknowledge  outward  sanctions,  and  learning  more    | 
and   more   to   acknowledge  only  inward   ones.      Of    ^ 


472  STATES  NO  SOONER  BECOME    UNITED 

course  this  improvement  in  the  common  lot  involves 
a  corresponding  demoralization  in  the  private  or  per- 
sonal sphere,  save  where  men's  personal  life  distinctly 
reflects  the  common  life,  or  acknowledges  no  law  so 
sacred  as  that  of  the  public  welfare.  For  there  are 
it  must  be  admitted  too  many  fierce  and  avaricious 
natures  among  us  to  whom  the  State  no  longer  exists 
as  the  symbol  or  representative  of  an  outward  order  in 
human  life,  and  at  the  same  time  does  not  begin  to  re- 
veal itself  as  the  symbol  or  representative  of  a  much 
more  constraining  inward  order,  and  all  these  neces- 
sarily look  upon  their  fellow-men  as  delivered  over  to 
their  use  to  be  fleeced  ad  libitum.  But  notwithstand- 
ing these  deplorable  limitations  I  insist  that  the  dis- 
tinctively common  unconscious  life  of  these  spiritual 
latitudes  —  that  is  to  say,  the  heart  and  mind  of  the- 
American  people,  uncontaminated  by  European  and 
especially  sacerdotal  pauperism  —  is  one  of  great  eleva- 
tion. And  there  is  no  way  to  account  for  the  fact  but 
by  acknowledging  that  the  American  State  is  really 
become  the  vehicle  of  an  enlarged  human  spirit.  I 
have  myself  no  doubt  of  the  constant  operation  of  this 
cause.*       Living   as   I   for   many   years   have   done 

*  It  ought  not  to  be  forgotten  in  this  connection  that  the  form  of  our 
polity  bears  on  its  very  face,  that  is,  in  its  name,  an  intimation  of  the 
spiritual  change  it  represents.  It  is  not  America,  but  the  United 
States  of  America,  "one  out  of  many,"  as  its  motto  reads,  to  "which  the 


THAN   SOCIETY  IS  INAUGURATED. 


among  plain  New  England  people,  I  am  continually 
struck  with  the  singular  natural  or  interior  refinement 
I  encounter  in  persons  who  have  obviously  been  all 
their  lives  without  any  exceptional  outward  advan- 
tages. They  spread  many  of  them  such  a  humane  or 
impersonal  savor  around  them  that  they  seem  "  native 
born "  to  the  skies,  and  if  their  culture  were  only 
equal  to  their  nature,  or  their  manners  as  good  as 
their  morals,  heaven  would  begin  to  be  realized  on 
earth.  But  we  cannot  have  everything  at  once,  and 
they  give  us  the  essential  at  least. 

The  sum  of  all  I  have  been  alleging  is  that  we 
as  a  community  are  fully  launched  at  length  upon 
that  metaphysic  sea  of  being  whose  mystic  waters  float 
the  sapphire  walls  of  the  New  Jerusalem,  metropolis 
of  earth  and  heaven.  It  is  not  a  city  built  of  stone 
nor  of  any  material  rubbish,  since  it  has  no  need  of 
sun  or  moon  to  enlighten  it ;  but  its  foundations  are 
laid  in  the  eternal  wants  or  passions  of  the  human 
heart  sympathetic  with  God's  infinitude,  and  its  walls 
are  the  laws  of  man's  deathless  intelligence  subjecting 
all  things  to  his  allegiance.  Neither  is  it  a  city  into 
which  shall  ever  enter  any  thing  that  defileth,  nor 


expiring  states  of  Europe  bow,  or  do  deepest  homage,  in  sending  over 
to  these  shores  their  starving  populations  to  be  nourished  and  clothed 
and  otherwise  nursed  into  citizenship,  which  is  a  condition  preliminary 
to  their  beiuEC  socialized. 


474         THE  ONLY  OBSTACLE  TO   GOD'S  KINGDOM 

any  thing  that  is  contrary  to  nature,  nor  yet  any  thing 
that  produceth  a  lie ;  for  it  is  the  city  of  God  coming 
down  to  men  out  of  the  stainless  heavens,  and  there- 
fore full  of  pure  unmixed  blessing  to  human  life,  and 
there  shall  be  no  more  curse.  These  things  are  hard 
to  be  believed  as  falling  within  the  compass  of  our 
dishonored  and  bedraggled  life.  But  this  is  only  be- 
cause om-  feeble-minded  and  narrow-hearted  clergy 
have  been  so  utterly  incompetent  as  a  general  thing 
to  divine  God's  infinitude,  or  enhghten  the  public 
sense  in  His  adorable  ways.  For  do  not  they  them- 
selves regard  our  beggarly  citizenship  as  the  final 
achievement  of  God's  omnipotence  in  our  nature  ? 
Do  they  not  perpetually  sacrifice  the  patient  bleeding 
truth  of  human  brotherhood  or  society  to  it  ?  Do 
they  not  consequently  cling  to  their  squalid  and  ven- 
omous little  ecclesiasticisms  as  the  last  hope  of  hu- 
manity ?  These  very  ecclesiasticisms  it  is  which  are 
the  foulest  stain  upon  humanity,  and  do  more  as 
Christ  alleged  than  all  the  world  to  make  men  willing 
children  of  hell.  At  the  bottom  of  every  human  heart, 
not  ecclesiastically  perverted,  there  is,  we  may  be  sure, 
a  latent  belief  in  God's  spiritual  omnipotence  or  in- 
finitude, and  a  hope  of  seeing  it  eventually  realized  in 
our  natural  form.  But  what  chance  have  this  benign 
belief  and  hope  of  surviving  the  torrent  of  falsity  and 
unbelief  which  now  descends  from  the  Christian  pul- 


IS  THE  HYPOCEISY  OF  THE  CHURCH.  475 

pit,  orthodox  and  unitarian  alike  ?  Christ's  own  name 
in  the  church  has  become  a  synonyme  for  the  most 
signal  dishonor  shown  to  God's  spiritual  perfection, 
and  he  who  was  put  to  his  death  of  shame  only  by 
the  righteous  men  of  his  day  and  generation,  now 
finds  himself  in  ours  resuscitated  to  one  infinitely 
more  infamous  and  helpless,  in  being  made  the  shib- 
boleth of  the  frankest  and  most  unconscious  spiritual 
hypocrisy  ever  revealed  under  heaven. 

The  best  life  of  the  world  is  growing  more  than 
suspicious  of  the  sanctity  which  attaches  to  facts  or 
events,  and  insists  accordingly  upon  finding  the  Chris- 
tian facts  and  events  interesting  or  memorable  only  in 
so  far  as  they  consent  to  represent  a  truth  very  much 
more  universal  than  they  literally,  or  on  their  face, 
constitute.  And  this  accounts  for  that  alleged  "  de- 
cease of  faith,"  which  has  become  among  our  dis- 
honest churchmen  the  fashionable  religious  cant  of 
our  day.  Men  of  a  spiritual  or  humanitary  culture 
are  becoming  very  contemptuous  of  any  Divine  cre- 
dentials that  are  not  first  of  all  exquisitely  and  in- 
tensely human.  They  unaffectedly  resent  the  old 
dogmatic  traditions  of  God's  outward  or  physical 
activity  in  creation  as  dreams  of  the  race's  pagan 
infancy.  They  are  ashamed  any  longer  to  acknowl- 
edge God  as  a  clever  charlatan  or  conjurer,  seeking 
by  an   incongruous   display  of  magical   power   and 


476  THE  LATE  COLLAPSED  MR.    MOODY 

majesty  to  propitiate  men's  inward  and  rational  rev- 
erence. And  in  confirmation  of  this  statement  I 
appeal  to  your  own  testimony  whether,  when  an}' 
noisy  "  evangelist "  so-called,  like  the  late  collapsed 
Mr.  Moody,  or  the  present  distended  Mr.  Cook,  comes 
along  to  insult  this  tender,  ineffable  Divine-natural 
renaissance  in  us,  and  menace  it  with  the  blight  of 
the  lower  regions,  you  have  not  yourself  always  ob- 
served that  the  energumenous  mountebank  never  suc- 
ceeds in  doing  any  thing  beyond  inflaming  his  fellow- 
quidnuncs  of  the  conventicle  but  convert  himself 
into  an  object  of  quiet  public  contempt  and  derision  ? 
This  indeed  is  one  of  the  most  heavenly  omens  of  our 
day,  when  we  consider  the  hopeless  inertness  of  the 
mass  of  men  to  the  solicitations  of  spiritual  truth,  that 
some  untidy  zealot  or  other  should  ever  and  anon  feel 
himself  prompted  by  his  irritable  lusts  to  come  forth 
from  his  subterranean  lair,  and  vituperate  the  sun- 
shiny upper  world  —  this  sunshiny,  respectable,  com- 
monplace world  —  until  by  his  grotesque  antics  he 
forces  it  in  spite  of  itself  to  recognize  the  spiritual 
arrogance  and  blasphemy  which  are  the  veritable  soul 
and  substance  of  our  professional  religion.  I  don't,  to 
be  sure,  very  much  love  this  respectable,  commonplace 
world  myself,  and  am  very  apt  to  feel  my  respiration 
impeded  under  its  decent  bondage ;  but  I  easily  con- 
done all   its  shortcomings,  were  they  twenty  times 


OR  PRESENT  DISTENDED  MR.   COOK.  477 

greater  than  they  are,  whenever  I  am.  thus  made  to  see 
how  steadfast  a  providential  breakwater  it  makes  to 
every  recurrent  wave  of  men's  fanatical  self-righteous- 
ness, or  tyrannous  love  of  dominion. 

But  it  is  time  to  bring  this  letter,  and  the  w^hole 
series  of  which  it  is  a  part,  to  an  end,  for  though 
many  an  interesting  point  remains  to  be  touched 
upon,  I  have  substantially  finished  the  task  I  con- 
templated when  I  set  out,  and  my  bodily  health  is  no 
longer  good  enough  to  make  work  for  its  own  sake 
attractive  to  me.  Now  that  my  task  is  done,  I  wish 
I  could  have  accomplished  it  more  skilfully ;  though 
to  have  accomplished  it  at  all,  with  the  impover- 
ished nerves  left  me,  is  matter  of  no  little  thanks- 
giving. I  have  had  no  help  in  writing  but  that  of  the 
Holy  Ghost,  which  nowadays  is  no  private  possession, 
but  is  the  common  property  of  all  spiritually  upright 
men,  being  the  identical  spirit  of  their  nature.  And 
accordingly  my  only  dread  all  along  has  been  lest  my 
inevitably  private  and  particular  accents  should  some- 
how overlay  and  obscure  its  public  or  universal  ones. 
What  I  thought  by  its  inspiration  to  say  to  you  at 
the  beginning  was  a  very  simple  thing.  I  intended 
to  show  the  exact  harmony  between  the  literal  per- 
sonal facts  of  Christ's  life,  and  the  spiritual  or  creative 
truth  of  which  those  facts  have  been  our  only  adequate 
harbinger  and  revelation.     Christ's  suffering  and  glo- 


478  THE  AUTHOR  TAKES  AN  AFFECTIONATE 

rified  person  was  but  a  normal  outcome  and  expression 
of  the  infinite  creative  love  towards  the  human  race, 
a  love  which  contents  itself  with  nothing  short  of  the 
rescue  of  the  created  nature  from  the  hands  of  the 
actual  or  phenomenal  creature,  and  its  exaltation  to 
supreme  dominion  :  and  if  we  honor  the  historic  type 
of  this  great  transaction,  much  more  ought  we  to  hon- 
or the  infinite  and  eternal  spiritual  substance  which 
alone  inwardly  shaped  it,  and  made  it  the  only  symbol 
of  thoroughly  perfect  or  Divine  manhood  the  world 
has  ever  known,  or  ever  will  know.  And  having  done 
this  I  thought  to  sing  a  paean  over  our  despised  and 
dishonored  nature,  which  is  at  last  enthroned  in  om- 
nipotent majesty  above  the  spiritual  world,  so  that 
the  once  divided  but  now  united  realms  of  heaven 
and  hell  fall  beneath  it,  and  equally  attest  its  will : 
or  if  not  equally,  who  knows  whether  in  the  miracu- 
lous providence  of  God,  what  is  last  in  rank  may  not 
as  heretofore  avouch  itself  first  in  use  ? 

This  I  repeat  was  all  in  effect  I  intended  to  say, 
and  so  do  justice  to  the  peaceful  spiritual  meaning  of 
the  Christian  facts  as  they  are  reported  in  the  gospels. 
But  I  found  my  pathway  so  beset  with  gainsaying 
not  only  on  the  part  of  our  professional  religionists, 
but  on  that  also  of  our  sectarian  scientific  zealots,  that 
I  was  obliged  to  pay  my  respects  to  these  several 
opponents  as  I  went  along,  so  that  in  spite  of  myself 


LEAVE  OF  HIS  CORRESPONDENT,  479 

my  voice  grew  full  of  tumult  even  in  setting  forth  the 
pacific  gospel  truth.     The  sectarian  religionist  cleaves 
to  the  Christian  facts,  hut  denies  their  subserviency  to 
a  Idgher  order  of  truth.     The  sectarian  "  scientist,"  as 
he  is  called,  denies  the  authenticity  of  the  Christian 
facts  in  submission  to  a  lower  order  of  facts.    I  hold  the 
Christian  facts  to  be  authentic,  because  I  see  them  to 
be  needful  ultimates  or  exponents  of  otherwise  undis- 
coverable  and  inconceivable  spiritual  truth.     Indeed  I 
hold  the  life,  death,  and  ascension  of  Jesus  Christ  to  be 
the  only  facts  of  human  history  which  are  not  in  them- 
selves illusory  or  fallacious,  because  they  alone  base  a 
new  creation  in  man  to  which  every  fibre  of  his  nature 
—  starved  and   revolted   by   the   actual    creation  — 
eagerly  responds.     But  viewing  the  facts  absolutely  : 
that   is,  regarding  them  apart  from   the  light  they 
reflect  upon  the  creative  infinitude  and  the  destiny  of 
man  the  creature  of  that  infinitude,  and  consequently 
as  designed  merely  to  set  off  the  person  of  Christ  to 
the  everlasting  homage  of  mankind :  they  seem  to  me 
utterly  flat,  vapid,  and  contemptible.     I  by  no  means 
desire  to  apologize  then  for  the  contentious  strain  of 
my  letter,  but  prefer  to  end  by  rehearsing  a  lovely 
bit  of  Swedenborg's  experience. 

"  Once  upon  a  time  a  numerous  crowd  of  spirits 
was  about  me  which  I  heard  as  a  flux  of  something 
disorderly.      The   spirits   complained,    apprehending 


480  BY  A  CITATION  FROM  SWEDENBORG, 

tliat  a  total  destruction  was  at  hand,  for  in  the  crowd 
there  was  no  sign  of  association,  and  this  made  them 
fear  destruction,  which  they  supposed  also  would 
be  total  as  is  the  case  when  such  things  [namely, 
the  absence  of  mutual  association]  happen.  But  in 
the  midst  of  this  disorderly  flux  of  spirits  I  apper- 
ceived  a  soft  sound  angelically  sweet  in  which 
was  nothing  but  harmony.  The  angelic  choirs  were 
witliin,  and  the  crowd  of  spirits  to  whom  the  discord 
belonged  was  without.  This  flowing  angelic  strain 
continued  a  long  while,  and  it  was  said  that  hereby 
was  represented  how  the  Lord  rules  things  confused 
and  disorderly  which  are  without  or  on  the  surface, 
namely  :  by  virtue  of  a  central  peace,  whereby  the 
inharmonic  things  in  the  circumference  are  reduced 
into  order,  each  being  restored  from  the  error  of  its 
nature." 

If  then  you  discern  the  central  peace  which  is  in 
my  little  book,  I  do  not  think  its  superficial  polemics 
will  seem  out  of  place.     And  so,  farewell. 


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APPENDIX    A. 


|EECY  is  equal  wlietlier  exhibited  towards  heaven  or 
hell.  It  is  of  mercy  to  be  punished,  because  all 
the  evil  of  punislmient  is  made  subservient  unto 
good.  —  A.  a  587. 

Equilibrium  is  so  perfect  in  the  spiritual  world  that  evil 
always  inevitably  returns  upon  him  who  commits  it,  and  so 
punishes  him.  This  is  called  the  permission  of  evil,  and  is 
allowed  for  the  sake  of  amendment,  and  thus  the  Lord  turns 
all  the  evil  of  punishment  into  good,  so  that  nothing  but 
good  is  from  Him. — A.  C.  592. 

An  evil  spirit  told  me  that  he  was  in  heaven  when  he  was 
in  the  life  of  self-love,  and  that  it  was  impossible  any  other 
heaven  could  be  than  the  one  he  made  for  himself.  But  it  was 
replied  that  his  (self-made)  heaven  is  turned  into  hell  whenever 
the  real  heaven  flows  into  it.  —  A.  C.  6484. 

By  the  marvellous  providence  of  tlie  Lord  evils  are  con- 
tinually bent  to  good :  for  the  Divine  end  to  good  universally 
reigns.  Hence  it  is  that  nothing  in  the  universe  is  permitted 
except  for  the  end  that  some  good  may  result  from  it.  But 
whereas  man  has  freedom  to  the  intent  thnt  he  may  be  re- 
formed, he  is  bent  to  good  so  far  as  he  permits  himself  to  be 
bent  in  freedom;   thus  continually  from  the  most  grievous 


482  APPENDIX  A. 


hell  into  which  he  strives  assiduously  to  plunge  himself,  into 
a  milder,  if  he  absolutely  cannot  be  led  to  heaven.  —  A.  C. 
6489  ;  see  also  3854. 

No  evil  can  befall  any  one  without  its  being  immediately 
counteracted,  for  when  evil  preponderates  tlien  it  is  chastised, 
by  the  law  of  equilibrium ;  but  solely  to  this  end,  that  good 
may  ensue.  —  A.  C.  689. 

"When  any  one  in  hell  does  evil,  he  is  punished ;  the  Lord 
permitting  this  for  the  sake  of  his  amendment,  since  He  is 
essential  justice.  —  True  Christian  Religion,  459. 

God  governs  and  disposes  all  things  by  turning  the  evil  of 
punishment  and  temptation  into  good.  —  A.  C.  245. 

It  is  to  be  further  observed  that  all  evil  inflows  mto  man 
from  hell,  and  all  good  from  the  Lord  through  heaven.  But 
the  reason  why  evil,  being  thus  an  influx  into  man,  is  appro- 
priated to  him  or  becomes  his  own,  is  because  he  believes  and 
persuades  himself  that  he  thinks  and  does  it  of  himself;  where- 
as if  he  believed  according  to  the  truth  of  the  case  that  it  is 
always  a  veritable  influx,  evil  would  not  then  be  appropriated 
to  him,  or  become  his  own,  but  good  from  the  Lord  would 
be  appropriated  instead.  For  in  this  case  w^hen  evil  flowed 
in  the  man  would  instantly  think  that  it  came  from  the  evil 
spirits  attendant  upon  him,  and  when  he  thought  this,  the 
angels  would  turn  it  aside  or  reject  it.  For  the  influx  of  the 
angels  is  into  what  a  man  knows  and  believes,  and  never  into 
what  he  does  not  know  and  believe :  since  angelic  influx  is 
nowhere  fixed  or  permanent  save  in  things  pertaining  to  man. 
When  man  thus  makes  evil  his  own,  by  obstinately  believing 
that  he  originates  it,  he  procures  to  himself  a  sphere  of  that 
particular  evil,  and  so  conjoins  himself  with  hell,  for  in  spir- 
itual life  conjunction  is  effected  by  accordant  spheres.     Thus 


APPENDIX  A.  483 


the  spiritual  sphere  of  man  or  spirit  exliales  from  the  life 
of  his  love,  and  advertises  his  quality  even  to  those  at  a 
distance  from  him.  —  A.  C.  6206. 

They  Avho  think  from  an  idea  of  space,  as  every  one  does 
who  is  in  the  world,  perceive  that  hell  and  heaven  are  spatially 
very  remote  from  man.  But  the  fact  is  exactly  contrary  to 
their  impression  of  it,  heaven  and  hell  being  in  man,  and 
nowhere  outside  of  him,  heaven  in  the  good  man,  and  hell 
in  the  bad  man.  Furthermore  every  one  after  death  floats 
into  the  exact  heaven  or  into  the  exact  hell  with  which  he 
identifies  himself  in  the  world.  —  A.  C.  8918. 

Sometimes  spirits  recently  deceased,  who  have  been  evil 
inwardly  during  their  life  in  the  world,  but  outwardly  orderly 
from  prudence,  comjjlain  that  they  are  not  admitted  into 
heaven,  having  apparently  no  other  opinion  of  heaven  but  as  a 
place  into  which  admission  is  granted  of  favor.  But  they 
are  told  that  heaven  is  denied  to  no  one,  and  if  they  desire 
admission  they  may  have  it.  But  when  they  come  into  the 
most  external  and  superficial  of  the  heavenly  societies,  they 
perceive,  by  reason  of  the  incongruity  of  the  heavenly  sphere 
with  their  own,  what  seems  to  them  an  infernal  anguish  and 
torment,  and  cast  themselves  down,  saying  that  heaven  is 
hell  to  them,  and  that  they  had  no  notion  previously  of  its 
being  such  an  uncomfortable  place.  —  A.  C.  4226. 


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APPENDIX    B. 


PROPRIUM  OR  SELFHOOD,  THE  SOURCE  OF  ALL  EVIL. 

AN^S  appearing  to  himself  to  have  a  proprium,  or 
private  seKhood^  is  a  state,  says  Swedenborg,  resem- 
bling sleep,  because  while  he  is  in  it  he  knows  no 
otherwise  than  that  he  lives,  tliinks,  speaks^  and  acts  of  him- 
self. When,  however,  he  begins  to  know  that  this  is  false 
he  starts  as  it  were  out  of  sleep  and  wakes  up.  —  A.  C.  147. 

Man^s  proprium  when  viewed  by  heavenly  light  appears 
altogether  like  something  osseous,  inanimate,  and  thoroughly 
deformed,  consequently  as  in  itself  dead.  But  when  vivified 
by  the  Lord^s  life  it  looks  like  flesh.  Man^s  proprium,  or 
selfhood,  is  indeed  a  mere  dead  nothing,  although  to  himself 
it  looks  so  real  and  important  as  even  to  be  his  all.  What- 
ever lives  in  man  flows  in  from  the  Lord's  life,  and  if  this 
influx  were  arrested  the  man  would  drop  stone  dead ;  for 
man  is  only  an  organ  receptive  of  life,  and  according  to  his 
recipiency  as  an  organ  will  be  his  reproduction  of  the  life. 
Eeal  proprium,  or  selfhood,  belongs  to  the  Lord  alone,  and 
from  his  proprium  is  vivified  that  of  man.  The  Lord^s  pro- 
prium is  indicated  by  his  saying  after  death  to  his  disciples 
who  thought  him  a  spirit :  "  a  spirit  hath  not  flesh  and  bones 
as  ye  see  me  have/'  —  A.  C.  149. 


APPENDIX  B.  485 


It  has  been  proved  to  me  by  sensible  experience  that  a 
man,  a  spirit,  and  an  angel,  considered  in  himself,  is  as  the 
most  vile  and  filthy  excrement,  and  when  left  to  himself 
breathes  nothing  but  hatred,  revenge,  cruelty,  and  the  foulest 
adulteries :  these  things  making  up  his  proprium,  and  will. 
This  may  appear  to  any  person  who  reflects  that  man,  "when 
first  born,  is  more  vile  than  any  living  animal,  and  that  when 
he  grows  up,  and  is  left  to  his  own  devices  —  unless  he  be 
prevented  by  external  restraints,  such  as  legal  penalties,  and 
those  prudential  restraints  which  he  imposes  upon  himself 
in  order  to  become  great  and  rich  —  he  would  rush  headlong 
into  all  sorts  of  wickedness,  and  never  rest  until  he  had 
subdued  all  men  to  himself,  and  seized  their  property,  not 
sparing  any  but  those  who  j)romised  to  become  his  slaves. 
Such  is  the  nature  of  every  man  [by  reason,  no  doubt,  of  the 
infinitude  of  his  creative  source,  reflected  in  what  is  so  obvi- 
ously unsuitable  to  reproduce  it  as  the  proprium,  or  private 
selfhood,  of  the  creature]  notwithstanding  his  own  ignorance 
of  it  growing  out  of  his  actual  inability  to  accomplish  his 
latent  evil  purposes.  But  were  it  possible  for  him  to  accom- 
plish them,  all  restraints  being  removed,  he  would  rush 
headlong  into  their  execution.  This  is  by  no  means  the  case 
with  beasts,  who  are  born,  to  a  certain  order  of  nature,  and 
kill  and  devour  purely  to  appease  the  cravings  of  hunger,  and 
when  this  is  satisfied  they  cease  doing  harm.  —  A.  C.  987. 

A  man's  proprium,  or  private  sclfliood,  is  actually  his  own 
particular  hell,  for  by  it  he  communicates  with  liell.  Thus 
the  selfhood  of  its  o\m  nature  desires  nothing  more  ardently 
than  to  precipitate  itself  into  hell,  and  also  to  draw  all  others 
aloncc  with  it.  —  A.  C.  1049. 


CENTRAL  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 

University  of  California,  San  Diego 

DATE  DUE 

SINT 

SPP  1  "^  NflSl 

lO  KtPAIR- 

1 

CI  39 

UCSD  Libr. 

r^ 


